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RAMBLES 

IN THE 

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

DURING THE YEAR 1845, 

WITH A SHORT 

ACCOUNT OF OREGON, 
By RUBIO. 



SECOND EDITION, 



LONDON: 
JOHN OLLIVIER, 59, PALL MALL. 

1847. 



£\>«XArvdl 



7A 



To LI H , Esq., 

London. 

My dear Sir, 

I had proposed during a late trip to New 
York to write you a series of letters, descrip- 
tive of the United States, and the impressions 
made upon my mind during a few months' tra- 
velling through that country. But, somehow or 
other, I never felt in the vein, and therefore 
preferred the leisure of the voyage home, and 
such accommodations as are to be met with in a 
private cabin, to give you these Rambles all of a 
heap, and thus save you, at least, the expense of 
foreign postage. 

Hoping you will make allowance for the tossing 
of a ship, and not consider the book too curiously, 
but rather as the plain sentiments of a practical 
man, I remain, 

My dear Sir, 
Your ever obliged friend, 
Rubio. 

Paris, October, 184o. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Introductory — Nature in America Great and Grand— Men con- 
temptible—Pulpit Denunciation — American Manners and Morals 
— Country not adapted for Farm Emigrants — Union not Per- 
manent—Weakness of the Executive — Opinions of Foreigners — 
Dickens and Trollope— Horrid Climate of the States — Mortality 
— 474 Deaths in New York weekly — Superiority of England . 1 

CHAPTER II. 

New York — Arrival and Pilot— Pilots all Teetotallers — Pilots 
Newspapers— Swampy Coast — Feeling of Disappointment — Erro- 
,1'ous Notions of Englishmen respecting American Freedom — 
American Bombast — Landing at Puddle Dock— No Lodgings — 
New York Filth — The Port — No Names to the Streets— Fires 
every Night — Boarding- Houses— Nothing eatable or drinkable 
in them — Americans adulterate everything— Eat like Wolves 
— Men have no Shoulders, Females no Bosoms — Ladies far from 
Pretty — No old People to be seen — Steam-Boats, fifteen make a 
Mile — People all Water- Drinkers — Clergy not given to Wine — 
All Teetotallers — No Pledge, no Congregation, Ardent Spirits 
publicly Deuounced by Six Presidents . . . .11 

CHAPTER III. . 

Poor Shops — Fire-Engines — Gratuitous System does not answer — 
River Hudson — Bottle of Port charged 32s. Cd. — American Mar- 
kets bad — King of Alleghania — Fruit and Vegetables scarce — 
Punch and Mrs Caudle — Trade in Cheap Publications — Moving 
the Mansion House — Brooklyn Ferry — Freedom without Law — 
Universal Suffrage does not answer — Mob Law — Polk the Great 
Unknown — His roaring means nothing — Annexation of Canada 
— Newspaper Press — Penny advertising . . . .31 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

PAGE 

One Church to every Three Hundred Inhabitants— Alterations in 
the Book of Common Prayer — Expected Visit of Queen Victoria 
to America — Nothing Permanent — All the Presidents have died 
Poor — Americans an ungrateful People — De Witt Clinton and 
Whitney — Salaries of Public Men— House Rent enormous — Public 
Buildings — Paper Ciu-rency— Bank note Engraving a good Busi- 
ness — Fountains — Packet Ships — Ships of British Colonies such as 
New Brunswick — American Navy — Temperance Ships of War — 
Flogging abolished in the Navy — American Boasting — Their 
Geese all Swans — Few learned Men — Abundance of Ice -Igno- 
rance — Where is Goldsmith's Auburn - Russian Climate — Specu- 
lation Mania — New Cities on Paper— Mulberries . . 51 

CHAPTER V. 

New England — Transcendentalists — Their Doctrines — Evils of 
Protecting Tariff — Probable Bankruptcy of Manufacturers — 
Disasters in Steam-Boats — Their Accommodations — Detestable 
Climate of the States — Cheap Board and Lodging -Hotels— Land 
Bargains — Rome and Syracuse - Railway Travelling Slow and 
Wearisome— Tin Roofing recommended — Rochester, Bankrupt 
Millers — Falls of the Genessee — Americans a Gloomy People — 
British Flag in Canada . . . . . .72 

CHAPTER VI. 

Lake Ontario — Falls of Niagara — Clifton Hotel — Heavy Shower — 
Toronto and Hamilton good Towns — Lower Canada, or Canada 
East, must be avoided, not adapted to English Farmers — Too 
cold — Emigrants should not stop till they reach Toronto or 
Hamilton in Canada West, or Upper Canada, as it used to be 
called— Superior to all other Colonies — No Failure of Crops — 
Near England, and Passage cheap — Land ought to be reduced to 
One Dollar per Acre, and no Credit — Few Taxes — Loyal People 
— Quebec and Montreal— Large Population — Healthy and Happy 
Colony — Too many Irish — Far better than any of the Newgate 
Colonies of Australia — Superior to the United States, where 
Englishmen cannot sell Land - Free and Popular Government 
— Cattle, Horses, and Sheep — Regret at leaving Canada . gy 



CHAPTER VII. 

Return to the States — Blackrock and Buffalo— Large Steamers — 
Cheap Living -Cheap Carriage — Cheap Travelling — Penny a 
Mile per First Class Trains - Town of Chicago 30,000 Inha- 



CONTENTS. 



(II U'TKK VII — continued. 



bitanta —Inland Navigation — Cleveland pretty Place — Building 
without Money — Paying Wages Ditto — American Lighthouses 
all Gratuitous— Speaker of the House — Propellers — Plucking 
Geese— Ohio River — Frostsevery Month in the Tear— Fire com- 
fortable 4th July — Cheap Coal -Disasters of English Emigrants 
in Illinois— Taking in the Britishers -Better to have gone to 
Canada — Road to Oregon — Peoria — Fort Madison — Prairie du 
Chien— Memphis . . . . . .108 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Co-operative Societies always successful — No Drinking, no Poverty 
— What are the English Clergy about? — American Temperance 
Pledge — Parallelograms — Rewards for the Poor — Bankrupt 
States — Go-a head Paying States — Cincinnati- Judge M-Lean — 
Louisville — Falls of the Ohio — Complaints of Trade — Evansville 
Blacksmith — Sickly Country — Fogs and Bogs — St Louis — Lead 
and Copper — Iron Mountain — Copper Harbour — Mississippi 
increases Fifteen Miles per Century in Length — Cotton 2£d. 
per lb. . . . . . . . 129 

CHAPTER IX. 

Rush of Waters -Funerals — Widows at Fifteen — American Young 
Ladies mere Dolls — Adieu to Fellow-passengers — Steam-boat 
Certificates — Cheap Engineers the dearest -Paying Members of 
Parliament a bad plan — Santa Fe and Oregon — American Spolia- 
tion—Three Million Slayes— If Property in Slaves were abolished 
the Traffic would cease — Free Labour best — Home, sweet Home 
— Monarchy preferable to Democracy — King of Mississippi — 
Probable Changes — Railway through the Desert to secure Oregon 
— Americans should buy our Claim for 5,000,000/.— The other 
Alternative more expensive. — American Policy should be Peace 
— Non-interference— Wheat 16s. per Quarter— English Corn and 
Cattle Laws bad . . . . . . .149 

CHAPTER X. 

Crowded Boats -Frightful Climate — Neither Iowa nor Wiskonsin 
recommended— Philadelphia Poor Place— Folly of High Tariffs 
— Poor Manufactures — Yellow Fever — Boots and Shoes — 
Wooden Clocks— Paper Mills— Soap— City of Brotherly Love the 
most disturbed in the Union— Constant Assassinations — Ha- 
zardous Risks— Fire Insurance — Army and Navy— Fifty For- 
midable Ships— No Grog— Flowers of Rhetoric— New Post-Office 
Law 171 



Vlll CONTEXTS. 

CHAPTER XI. 

PAGE 

Education — Learned Professors -National Bank impossible for 
Want of Honest Men — The Voluntary Principle — Freehold Pews 
— Chapel Speculations — Religious Sects Harmless — Church 
turned into Post Office - His Excellency the Rev. Mr Everett, 
late Minister at St James's — Mr M'Lean — Mr Marcy — Public 
Lotteries — Provision for the Poor— Americans have no Music 
in their Souls — Two Drunken Bishops — Conclusion . . 188 

CHAPTER XII. 

New England States : Maine— New Hampshire — Vermont — 
Massachusetts — Rhode Island — Connecticut. Middle States : 

" New York New Jersey — Pennsylvania- Delaware. Southern 
States: Maryland — District of Columbia — Virginia, — North 
Carolina - South Carolina — Georgia — Florida— Alabama —Mis- 
sissippi-Louisiana. Western States : Ohio — Kentucky — Ten- 
nessee — Michigan — Indiana — Illinois — Missouri— Arkansas — 
Wisconsin — Iowa — Texas . . . . .198 



APPENDIX. 

Geographical and General View of Oregon : Its Islands — 
The Coast and its Harbours. The Natural Divisions of 
Oregon: The Three Regions— Climate and Characteristics of 
the Three Regions — Its Rivers ..... 224 



RAMBLES IX THE EXITED STATES, 



CHAPTER I. 

Introductory — Nature in America Great and Grand— Men con- 
temptible — Pulpit Denunciation — American Manners and Morals 
— Country not adapted for Farm Emigrants — Union not Per- 
manent—Weakness of the Executive — Opinions of Foreigners — 
Dickens and Trollope — Horrid Climate of the States — Mortality 
— 474 Deaths in New York weekly — Superiority of England. 

Nothing can be more unlike our previously con- 
ceived notions of any country than the reality on 
arrival. All the books that have ever been written 
on the subject of America, from Fearon to Toque- 
ville, are quite inadequate to give the reader any- 
thing more than a very vague and faint idea of the 
Great Republic, as the natives delight to call it. 

All that nature has done for America is great and 
noble, on a magnificent and gigantic scale ; her rivers, 
mountains, lakes, cataracts, forests, plains, minerals, 
heats, frosts, fevers, and premature deaths, are all 
astounding and calculated to inspire us with awe. 

B 



2 PULPIT DENUNCIATION. 

But, on the other hand, it is not so with the in- 
habitants ; the men inspire us with very different 
feelings from their vulgarity, hypocrisy, ignorance, 
and dishonesty, together with their constant sordid 
and grovelling pursuit of dollars and cents, and in 
obtaining which they do not appear to be particu- 
larly successful, as there is scarce a dollar to be seen 
in circulation through the whole country. 

With regard to the barefaced hypocrisy and dis- 
honesty of Americans in the eastern and middle 
States, I am perfectly borne out by one of their 
most clever and popular preachers, who said in one 
of his most admired sermons, delivered in New 
England, — " You come here, and by a listless atten- 
dance at the House of God on Sundays, and the 
austere observance of the appointed fast days, you 
expect to atone for all your wicked actions, wrong- 
thoughts, and unholy feelings in the past week — a six 
days' life of meanness, deception, rottenness, and sin ! " 

Who knew so well as this eminent teacher and 
preacher the weak points of his congregation ? And 
how can we look with anything like respect upon a 
people who deserve such a severity of reproof ? The 
fact is, it is not in the nature of things for an 
American to listen to the old saying, that " Honesty 
is the best policy ; " they cannot believe it ; and, 
whilst the nations of all the rest of the world look 
upon it, not only as a wise proverb, but an axiom 
of the profoundest philosophy, the American read- 



AMERICAN MANNERS AND MORALS. 3 

ing is entirely different, their maxim being that 
" Roguery is the best policy ! " 

I certainly will not go so far as a French friend 
of mine who had resided twenty-five years in the 
States, and gave it as his opinion, that the next best 
speculation, after General Tom Thumb, would be to 
find a complete American gentleman — that rara avis 
in terris— and exhibit him in London and Paris at a 
shilling a head ! Though every one must admit, who 
travels through the United States, that the human- 
izing influences of polished society are entirely want- 
ing throughout that country : and, therefore, it is no 
wonder the Americans are generally vulgar : but 
why they should be hypocrites in the northern States, 
rogues in the middle, and ruffians in the south, is 
not so easily accounted for. The western states 
have as yet hardly earned any peculiar and distin- 
guishing character, except for industry and enter- 
prise under all the disadvantages of a deadly climate. 
I have no hesitation in pronouncing the United 
States of America an inferior country : and after 
150,000 miles of travelling in every corner of the 
world, my opinion may be entitled to some little 
degree of credit. Every one that emigrates to that 
country will be disappointed, except the wild Irish, 
who, though they cannot well be worse off than they 
are in Connaught and Munster, may be constantly 
heard grumbling by the side of their wheelbarrows, 
in New York, wishing to be back to their hovels 



UP 



4 UNION NOT PEEMANENT. 

and potatoe-parings in Ould Ireland. As for making 
any comparison between the United States and the 
United Kingdom, it is out of the question, and 
would be entirely degrading to Great Britain ; and 
I should as soon think of comparing Captain Tyler, 
who, by the accidental death of General Harrison, 
became President of the United States, and was 
nicknamed in consequence His Accidency ; I should 
as soon think of comparing the two countries to- 
gether, as I should compare the President of Ame- 
rica with Queen Victoria ; the one, as I have seen 
him, combing his hair with a filthy comb tied up 
with a piece of string, in a steam-boat, and washing 
himself with a jack-towel in common with fifty 
other dirty passengers : and the other, whom every 
Briton delighteth to honour — the real Queen of the 
richest, most powerful, and most stupendous empire 
the world ever saw, upon which the sun never sets, 
and the booming of whose morning and evening 
guns is a perpetual salute from station to station 
round the globe. 

With regard to the probable permanency of the 
American Union, in the present infancy of the Re- 
public, it is only possible to venture an opinion. The 
Americans themselves are everlastingly bragging that 
they will soon reckon a hundred millions of inhabi- 
tants, stretching from ocean to ocean; and that, as 
soon as they have got their navy yards and line-of- 
battle ships at the mouth of the Oregon, all other 



WEAKNESS OF THE EXECUTIVE. 5 

nations may shut up shop, and that "Rule Britannia " 
will then become an empty boast. Xow, when we 
consider that this best of all possible governments is 
only an experiment of some sixty years' standing, it 
would become the Americans, if they had any grain 
of modesty, but which they unfortunately have not, 
to pause before they crow over the other poor deluded 
nations of Europe, as they call them, and ask them- 
selves where all the present fury of party politics, 
the wickedness, bribery, and corruption of their 
government, the reckless aggrandisement and exten- 
sion of their territory to Texas and Oregon is to end ? 
And the most difficult of all, what is to become of 
the three millions of discontented slaves, and their 
constant increase, in a land whose written constitu- 
tion sets out by proclaiming to mankind that all 
men are born free and equal ! 

It needs no ghost to come from the grave to tell 
us that the glory will be departed from the United 
States long before they attain their expected popula- 
tion of a hundred millions, and that, long before that 
period, the " Queen of the World and the child of 
the skies " will most likely be split into three or four 
separate governments. The present cabinet of Colo- 
nel Polk is weak in the extreme, and so are all the 
heads of departments ; and we all know to be weak 
is to be miserable. The chief himself is already tired 
of his elevation, which he finds to be not altogether 
a bed of velvet ; and, though it may be fun to the 



6 WEAKNESS OF THE EXECUTIVE. 

democrats who elected Mm, the Great Unknown, out 
of sheer opposition to a worthy and virtuous man, 
Henry Clay, yet it was death to him, and he publicly 
declared, before he had been three months at the 
White House, that he had no intention, at the end of 
his four years of kingship, to offer himself again as 
representative of the sovereign people ! The Colo- 
nel is considered by the few who know him as a 
plain, straightforward man for a lawyer, with firm- 
ness and courage, but knows nothing of the science 
of government, which should only be entrusted to 
him who possesses most virtue, most knowledge, and 
most intellect. But these, though they are recom- 
mendations in old and experienced countries, are the 
very worst and most fatal qualifications to a candi- 
date's success in America for the presidential chair. 
No honest man can ever he President of America 
again. The day of the Washingtons and Jeffersons 
is past, never to return. The people publicly declare 
that they do not want the best man ; they want the 
most available man. If you elect me I will appoint 
you ; and as all the servants of the Government are 
abruptly turned out at a general election every four 
years, it gives the new President immense patronage, 
and for the first half-year of his office he is obliged to 
work like a horse in considering upon and filling up 
the ten thousand offices that suddenly become vacant. 
" Eotation to office" is one of the watchwords of every 
party in America, but particularly of the democrats. 



OPINIONS OF FOREIGNERS. 7 

All classes in America are excessively greedy of 
praise ; the love of approbation, as Combe would say, 
being strongly developed in their crania. Notwith- 
standing the repeated warnings they have received, 
they cannot believe it possible that the strictures of 
Mrs Trollope or Dickens can have emanated from 
anything but a spirit of rancour and national jealousy. 
With regard to Boz, this was the unkindest cut of all : 
and I need not caution that clever writer to steer 
clear of the United States for the remainder of his 
natural existence, for if they were to catch him in 
Broadway not all the 8,000 Irishmen forming the 
grand army of the United States, if they were sud- 
denly recalled from Texas, Florida, the Canadian 
and Indian frontiers, would be able to protect Mr 
Dickens from being tarred and feathered. They do 
not like the truth, and will not tolerate it from any 
man. Whilst to praise the Americans and their in- 
stitutions is still worse than to show up their defects ; 
and you thus most certainly secure their abuse, at the 
same time you confirm them in their prejudices ; when 
by the other open and honest way, you at least open 
the door to improvement, though the galled jade 
may wince. 

The Scotch, who in many respects I am sorry to 
say resemble the Americans, hated Dr Johnson for 
abusing their barren country, and for saying that he 
did not see a tree there larger than his walking-stick. 
The consequence was immediately seen in rewards 



8 HORRID CLIMATE OP THE STATES. 

offered by various agricultural meetings to the largest 
planters ; and the forests of larch and firs over many- 
parts of Scotland, at the present day, testify to the 
good use the canny Highlandman made of the Doc- 
tor's abuse. So it is in America ; many of the 
improvements making and made in their social 
state, are attributable to the showing up of English 
travellers. 

There is one more subject which may as well be 
alluded to thus early, as it is of the very last import- 
ance when speaking of the United States, but which 
has never been prominently brought forward by any 
writer on that country, at least in the manner it 
deserves, and that is, the climate, which I consider 
to be the worst in the world, that is in the temperate 
regions of the world from 231 deg. to 66^ deg. The 
writer's opinion is that there is not an inch of the 
country but what labours under the most unfortu- 
nate and intolerable climate. On the 29th of May 
last, in New York, the frost was so severe as to cut 
off every green thing. The thermometer fell to 24 
deg., and on the 18th July the same thermometer 
was up to 104 deg., showing a rise of 80 deg. in less 
than two months.* During the cold on the 29th 
May, it seemed as if the marrow had all left the 

* By an account in an American print it appears that in the west- 
ern country at sun rise, lately, the thermometer indicated 18 deg., 
and at noon of the same day it stood at 94 deg., a difference of 76 
deg. of temperature in about five or six hours ! 



MORTALITY. 9 

bones, and every one stood shivering almost incapa- 
ble of exertion. Not that 24 deg. of cold is any- 
thing very intolerable when it comes at Christmas or 
in January or February, but here the excessive cold 
had been preceded by some extraordinary hot weather 
in the middle of May, and the sudden transition 
which occurred in the short space of nine or ten days 
made the sensation of cold on the 29th May most 
acute and painful ; but there is a remedy for cold, 
however severe— additional clothing, additional fires, 
and extra exercise. But how are you to alleviate 
great heat ? In the night as well as day, on the sea- 
board of the States it is all the same, and even at 
Boston, the head- quarters of ice, the thermometer 
in July was a degree or two higher than at New 
York : the heat of Calcutta and Jamaica, without 
the luxuries or the conveniences of the first, or the 
sea-breezes of the last. And yet, with all this miser- 
able heat, when people are dying on every hand 
around you,* and you are incapable of the slightest 



* The Weekly Report of deaths in New York, for the week end- 
ing 20th July, 1845, and signed by Cornelius Archer, City 
Inspector, was four hundred and seventy-four in a population of 
350,000, whilst in the same week in London, the Report published 
gave eight hundred and forty-four deaths. Now, reckoning the 
difference of the population of the two cities, London, according to 
the proportion in New York, ought to show a mortality of 3,000 
deaths per week ! And yet London is not so well supplied with 
water as New York, and the drunkenness of London is beyond all 
comparison greater than in the American city. 



10 SUPERIORITY OF ENGLAND. 

exertion, the country cannot produce an orange or a 
bunch of grapes, because it is too cold ! 

For beef, pork, and butter, wheat, and Indian 
corn, these main requisites and necessaries of life, the 
United States excel all other countries, but beyond 
this you must look in vain for the comforts, enjoy- 
ments, luxuries, and the elegantife et delicia? vita? of 
•a residence in any part of London. I have long made 
up my mind that a shilling in England is better than 
a dollar or 4s. in the United States, and it is some 
comfort to know that it is far easier to earn the shil- 
ling in England than the dollar in America ; and fur- 
ther than this I feel convinced that the better class 
of London mechanics, those who earn their fifty, 
sixty, and seventy shillings per week, eat and drink 
every day of their lives better and nicer food than 
two-thirds of the inhabitants of the United States 
from the President downwards. But, not to detain 
the reader further, we will proceed to our arrival in 
and first impressions of America. 



. CHAPTER II. 

New York — Arrival and Pilot— Pilots all Teetotallers — Pilots 
Newspapers — Swampy Coast — Feeling of Disappointment — Erro- 
neous Notions of Englishmen respecting American Freedom — 
American Bombast — Landing at Puddle Dock— No Lodgings — 
New York Filth — The Port — No Names to the Streets— Fires 
every Night — Boarding-Houses— Nothing eatable or drinkable 
in them — Americans adulterate everything— Eat like Wolves 
— Men have no Shoulders, Females no Bosoms — Ladies far from 
Pretty — No old People to be seen — Steam-Boats, fifteen make a 
Mile — People all Water- Drinkers — Clergy not given to Wine — 
All Teetotallers — No Pledge, no Congregation, Ardent Spirits 
publicly Denounced by Sis Presidents. 

We arrived on the coast of America from the tro- 
pics ; there were no other passengers but a young 
American and myself. We were steering for Cape 
Hatteras, weather cold and squally, and I shivered up 
on deck, hearing that we were laying the ship to, 
previous to sounding with the deep-sea lead. We 
were in sixty fathoms, and yet no land to be seen. 
We kept on sounding and shoaling till we descried a 
pilot-boat from Cape May. They came alongside, 
but hearing that we were bound for New York, these 
Philadephian gentlemen would have nothing to do 



12 PILOTS ALL TEETOTALLEES. 

with us ; but the following day another pretty little 
schooner, having a large painted distinguishing mark 
in her sails, came very near to us in a rough and 
stormy sea, and we backed the head- sails whilst the 
pilot came on board in a little cockle-shell of a dingy, 
that you could almost carry under your arm. We 
were very glad to get him on board ; and, after 
admiring the elegant and fairy-like proportions of 
his watery home, the schooner shoved off, and we 
began to ask the news. The pilot service of the 
port of New York may be considered as nearly per- 
fect ; it consists of thirteen schooners, of about sixty, 
seventy, up to ninety tons burthen, and costing six 
and seven thousand dollars each. 

There are seventy pilots, all middle-aged men, 
and none are eligible except total abstinence men; 
therefore vessels are never lost owing to drunken 
pilots ; this is impossible. The English might 
here borrow a leaf out of the American book. It 
frequently happens, on arriving in the English 
channel, that the pilot who boards you is a man of 
seventy years of age, and I have known him hoisted 
up with a tackle, because he was too infirm for 
climbing up the side-ladder ; but an important service 
like that of pilots should be limited to the ages be- 
tween thirty and sixty. And, moreover, the first 
thing an English pilot asks for, is a glass of grog ; 
whilst the New York pilot who boarded us, a hun- 
dred miles from the port, in common with the other 



NEWSPAPERS. 1 3 

sixty-nine of the fraternity, are pledged to drink 
nothing stronger than tea or coffee, or they would be 
refused a licence. 

We were very much amused with the variety of 
fresh newspapers which the pilot kept pulling out of 
his pockets, large and close-printed, the size of the 
' Morning Advertiser ' in London, and published at a 
halfpenny each ! True they were on inferior paper, 
badly printed, with worn-out type, with violent 
language, personalities, and party politics, for the 
stock in trade of the editor. " Ah," said the pilot, 
" it is party that is killing our country." 

But the weather was so cold and cheerless that I 
could no longer remain on deck. We were running 
along an extremely low sandy coast, with salt water 
ponds inside the sand hills, the great nursery of the 
large oysters for the New York market. It is a low 
miserable shore all the way to New York, and was 
enough to strike a damp into our minds, being so 
different from the splendid mountains we had left 
only a few weeks before. This first sight of the 
North American continent continued two days, and 
was calculated greatly to depress us, particularly as 
we had been all the voyage, with the prompting and 
assistance of our young American fellow-passenger, 
filling our imaginations with the idea of the beautiful 
land we were approaching, its astonishing greatness 
in physics and morals, and the overwhelming splen- 
dour of New York, not forgetting Niblo's and Castle 

c 



14 FEELING OF DISAPPOINTMENT. 

Gardens. Notwithstanding this first disappointment 
of the low, sandy, swampy and unhealthy coast, I 
was determined to be pleased with everything, and to 
become, in short, an American in feeling ; and as I 
had long been familiar with all her popular institu- 
tions, and model of cheap and effective government, 
it was not impossible but I might purchase a small 
property in the country, and so become a naturalized 
citizen of the Great Republic. I really was ena- 
moured, before landing, with everything American, 
from universal suffrage clown to her rocking chairs, 
and used to think that we Avere centuries behind 
her in the science of legislation and cheap govern- 
ment. I had been taught that monarchy was 
naturally extravagant, splendid, and expensive ; that 
it was careless of the sufferings of the people ; and 
provided it could succeed in raising the taxes, it 
thought of nothing else but the interests and enjoy- 
ments of courts and courtiers. But we were now 
passing the entrance to the Bay of New York, or the 
" Narrows" as it is called, about three quarters of a 
mile wide, and it all looked very pretty, and newly 
painted ; but still all flat and low. Fort Lafayette 
is on the right hand going in, and is considered, in the 
hyperbolical language of America, another Gibraltar. 
There are also a few fortifications on the left hand, 
opposite to the Fort Lafayette. But the ' Queen' 
and the ' Howe,' with the ' Great Western ' lashed 
between them, and of course protected by them, would 



AMERICAN BOMBAST. 15 

render the American Gibraltar, like the Chinese 
Forts in the Bocca Tigris, a dead letter in about 
fifteen minutes ! 

"Is not that a beautiful flag ?" said my young- 
American friend, pointing to the national colours ; 
" can anything be finer than this glorious expanse of 
water ? You that have seen the Bay of Naples, 
which do you prefer, Naples or New York ? " 

" Gently, gently, my dear friend ; you are getting 
on too fast ; perhaps you will allow me to ask a 
cruestion ; which of the two great modern poems do 
you prefer, ' Childe Harold,' or ' Cock Robin ? " 
But in the true American ignorance, he candidly 
replied that he could not say, for he had never read 
either. 

We were now actually stepping on shore at the 
Battery Point, the universal landing-place for every 
person arriving in New York. It is exactly like 
Puddle dock, Blackfriars, where the scavengers 
collect and transfer the stinking accumulations of 
rottenness and filth to be sold for manure. Had it 
been summer, and under the fervid beams of a New 
York sun, it must have produced malaria and sick- 
ness, but these people think nothing of these things. 

As I was not troubled with anything more than a 
carpet bag, having left our luggage on board the 
ship, I preferred proceeding on foot ; so, leaving the 
said travelling bag in charge of an honest-looking 
Irishwoman sellino: cakes, with orders to deliver it 



16 NO LODGINGS. 

to nobody but myself, I set off to look for lodgings. 
But, after walking up Broadway and most of the 
principal streets of the city, I could not discover one 
single bill up, in any of the windows as I walked along. 
This I thought very characteristic and singular, and 
rather a prosperous sign. In the same length of walk 
in London I could have counted a thousand, either 
" Apartments Furnished," " Room to Let," " Lodg- 
ings for a Single Gentleman," " Unfurnished Rooms," 
or something of the kind, but in New York, after 
three hours' trudge, not one solitary notice of the kind. 
I knew that it was not the fashion to live on the soli- 
tary system, but to congregate in boarding houses, and 
so, after a very agreeable and instructive walk of 
about three hours through the principal streets of the 
city, I returned to the old cake woman, and recovered 
the carpet bag, and proceeded in a cab to one of the 
neighbouring boarding houses. 

My walk had led me through some of the dirtiest 
streets I had ever seen in my life. Seven years 
Augean collection of all sorts of nastiness seemed to 
be here ripening for the first summer's sun, to regale 
the noses of the New Yorkers, and yet there is no 
lack of street inspectors ; I was told there are upwards 
of a dozen ; but they, like all other employees, appear 
to make their offices nothing more than a great 
school of politics. But the first glance at the port 
of New York stamps it at once as the greatest seat 
of commerce in the world, London alone excepted. 



NEW YORK FILTn. 17 

Bristol and Liverpool, Hamburg, Havre, Bordeaux, 
and Marseilles, Lisbon and Cadiz, Calcutta and 
Bombay, Bahia or Bio de Janeiro, are all contempti- 
ble in comparison of New York as a sea-port, which 
seems to be formed by nature as the chief emporium 
of shipping of the civilized world. The city is also 
well laid out, the streets long and straight, though, 
being built on a low, swampy, narrow island, it is all 
length and no breadth, and the price of building land 
must therefore go on continually advancing in the 
neighbourhood of the Park, Astor House, and other 
favourite localities for business. 

Strange to say, with all the accumulated filth in 
the streets down town, as it is called, the inhabitants 
of this great maritime city think New York the 
cleanest place in the world ; and stranger still, though 
I was nearly breaking my neck every five minutes in 
looking up to find the names of the streets, they have 
a repugnance to have them written up, though every 
house in the business part of the city is plastered 
over with enormous letters, from the basement to 
the attics, with the names and callings of the fifty 
different people that dwell therein, yet they will not 
write up the names of their streets. In London, but 
more especially in Paris, it is universally the practice 
to put up the names at every corner of the city ; and 
in the French capital they are much more elegantly 
painted, and better attended to, than in London. 

The Croton Aqueduct is deservedly the pride of 

c 2 



18 FIRES EVERY NIGHT. 

the city. It has cost twelve millions of dollars, and 
competent engineers have assured me that it might 
have been done for nine millions. But if it had cost 
twenty millions it would have been cheap ; for it has 
distributed health and cleanliness, comfort and cheer- 
fulness, all through the extensive city, and the rates 
of fire insurance fell one-half from the day the plugs 
were opened to the public. 

The first night I slept in New York there was a 
large fire, but nobody regarded it, as it only con- 
sumed nineteen houses. The next night there was 
another, and not a night or a day passed without 
one ; and many months after the first night of my 
return to New York, after a tour to the Mississippi, 
burst forth the great fire of 20th July ; at which time, 
as I said before, the thermometer was at 103 deg. 
and the place might, in every sense, be called a 
" burning city." 

I went to several boarding houses before finally 
making a selection. In answer to inquiries for the 
terms, they were generally reasonable enough: the 
highest two dollars a day, about 8s. 6d. sterling ; and 
the lowest one dollar. At these last I inquired their 
hours. Breakfast at six o'clock and half-past : — hot 
beef-steaks, mush and milk, hommaney, rice and 
molasses, mackerel, salmon, shad, hot cakes, and rolls 
of every description ; tea and coffee. Dinner at 
twelve o'clock, and supper at six. The bill of fare, 
on reading, looks abundant enough ; but really, on 



NOTHING EATABLE. 19 

inspection, this well-covered table offers to an Eng- 
lishman very little that is even eatable, much less 
palatable. Though every one must admire the early 
hours and temperance of the Americans, yet only 
imagine a Londoner, and an old hand, not used to 
anything much Avorse than the shady side of Pall- 
mall, assembling at six o'clock at the noise of a great 
bell — washed and shaved, mind, by six o'clock — to 
look at an immense rump-steak at the head of the 
table swimming in fat, not half cooked ; then lower 
down a dish of enormous salt mackerel, one of which 
would make two of our English mackerel ; then 
some Halifax salmon just as taken from the barrel, 
and as salt as brine ; then two or three smaller- 
dishes, some with mush, a food for pigs, and others 
with hommaney, only differing from mush in that 
this last is ichite maize ground and boiled in water, 
whilst mush is yellow corn ground and boiled. As 
this sort of food is not known in England, thank 
God, except in the penitentiaries, I have been rather 
particular in describing it. No caution is required 
to my countryman to avoid it, because the very 
sight of it will be enough to make him sick. The 
remainder of the table was filled up with some 
warmed-up tough old hen, called chicken fixings, all 
washed down with the most execrable coffee in the 
whole world. I used to think that England might 
defy all creation for bad coffee, but the Americans 
beat us hollow. It is all that abominable trash from 



20 EAT LIKE WOLVES. 

Rio, costing there about twopence halfpenny per 
pound by the cargo ; and as the Americans really 
seem to be no judges, even of things they are con- 
stantly putting into their mouths, or else so careless 
that they care nothing about it, whether it be good 
or bad, all is Brazilian coffee bought by the board- 
ing-house keeper, ready ground, and of course, as 
the Americans adulterate everything, ready mixed. 
I was, therefore, obliged to take refuge in tea, ge- 
nuine Hyson skin, worth about ninepence per pound ; 
for, singular to say, on these two important articles 
with the English government in a financial view — tea 
and coffee — the tariff of the Americans admit both 
of them entirely free of duty. There is one thing 
to be acknowledged at all American tables — the 
universal excellence and profusion of fresh butter. 
In all one's travels through that vast country, I 
never saw anything approaching to a piece of rancid 
or inferior butter. 

We were some thirty or forty at breakfast. The 
men ate like wolves, and, cheap as it was, I reckoned 
it cost them a shilling per minute.* Little children, 
who also assemble at these tables, were permitted by 
their foolish mothers to be guzzling raw rump-steaks 
swimming in fat at six o'clock in the morning ! 

There is also at the breakfast table a profusion of 
nice-looking hot yellow cakes, called, I believe, 

* A New York shilling is worth an English sixpence. 



MEN HAVE NO SHOULDERS. 21 

Johnny cakes, made of Indian corn, but they are 
like mush and hommaney — only fit for pigs or pri- 
soners. This valuable grain, which is one of the 
greatest gifts of nature, and which is more exten- 
sively cultivated in the States than in any other 
country, under the single name of green corn, forms 
a delicious dish of vegetable at dinner, little inferior 
to green peas, but in every other shape or manner of 
preparation it is perfectly execrable, and would 
scarcely be eaten by a Scotchman, although accus- 
tomed to his oatmeal porridge. Though not im- 
portant, it still deserves mentioning, that at what 
may be called the cruet department of an American 
dinner table, an Englishman feels greatly disap- 
pointed. The mustard, pepper, vinegar, &c. form 
the most detestable collection of nastiness ever put 
upon a table cloth, and perfectly impossible for an 
Englishman to touch. This is not merely the case 
at the dollar boarding houses, but it is universal all 
over the cities and towns of the sea board and the 
interior. 

In Broadway, the principal street in New York, 
but not near so fine as Regent street or Oxford 
street, the characteristics of the Americans as a 
people are hardly to be distinguished, as nearly one 
third of the passengers are foreigners ; but in walking 
leisurely through the other principal streets, the 
physical conformation of the true-blooded Yankee, 
as he calls himself, begins to be developed. The 



22 FEMALES NO BUSTS. 

men have no shoulders : they are tall and lathy like 
corn-stalks, and under the nape of the neck they are 
sometimes as narrow as a female. The ladies of 
New York have been through all time, which means 
about fifty years, so famous for their beauty, that 
I know I shall be accused of heresy, envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness if I say that it is 
entirely a mistake. But the truth must be told, and 
I have seen more pretty women in London in one 
day than ever I saw during all my rambles in the 
United States. That prominent point of female 
loveliness, and which the whole English race so 
much excel in, is entirely wanting in the American 
ladies : they are as flat as their own horrid sea- 
coast ; and though they artfully endeavour to con- 
ceal this national deficiency by a peculiar, newly- 
invented, and really very ingenious corset, yet it 
will not do; our imaginings return unsatisfied, and 
our worst suspicions come back confirmed. 

But it must be confessed, that what they want in 
busts they make up in bustles, and to an excess that 
shocks an English female, and which is so glaring 
and preposterous as to be downright indelicate. 

The pure red and white of English complexions 
must not be looked for in any part of the States. 
The lilies and the carnations are not of American 
growth ; the men are sallow, and the women tallow. 

Another thought occurs involuntarily to the pedes- 
trian through the city, where are the old men and 



XO OLD PEOPLE. 23 

women ? You see none, absolutely none. Now, I 
know a town in the United Kingdom, not the United 
States, where every third person you meet is seventy 
years of age ! But the fact is, from the statistical 
tables published, the mortality of the American cities 
and towns is frightful ! According to the weekly bills 
of mortality for London during the summer of 1845, 
the number of deaths every week in New York 
ought not to exceed one hundred and forty. All 
beyond one hundred and forty is unnatural, excessive, 
and premature, and therefore, by adopting greater 
sanatory precautions, the average salubrity of the 
city would be improved. Abolishing that nuisance 
at the landing place at Whitehall before alluded to, 
as resembling Puddle dock, would effect some good, 
filling up that most pestiferous slip near it, and abol- 
ishing some of the other nuisances going towards the 
pier of the Great Western steamer, would also have 
excellent results. 

Nobody of the slightest observation can rest easy 
in New York until he has seen and visited the splen- 
did steamers for which she is so justly celebrated. 
And it gives the writer infinite pleasure, to so much 
censure to be able to throw in even an ounce of 
praise. But the New York steamers are beyond all 
praise. To go on board the ' Troy,' the ' Empire,' 
the 'Massachusetts,' the ' Rhode Island,' the ' Nara- 
ganset,' and the hundreds of others, many even 
superior to these, is quite a treat, and well worth 



24 AMERICAN STEAM-BOATS. 

crossing the Atlantic to see. I am a most strenuous 
advocate for every person, no matter what his pur- 
suit, visiting the United States, but to stop and 
reside there permanently, the Great Republic is not 
yet rich enough to tempt me with a sufficient bribe. 
Certainly to be President of the United States, or 
slave of the lamp as I call him, would not induce me 
to exchange my humble doings at the west end of 
London, with the charming facilities of securing 
access, whenever the fit takes one, to Paris or Rome. 
But to return to the magnificent steamers on the 
north and east rivers. They are as truly surprising 
in their dimensions as they are convenient and pro- 
fuse in their decorations. Fifteen steam-boats make 
a mile : this is a new rule of arithmetic, only found 
out in America, and I mention it because it is much 
more easy than to remember that they are three hun- 
dred and fifty feet long each. The Americans of all 
classes are a travelling people, eminently so as con- 
fined to their own country ; but they know nothing 
of any other countries. The United States is large 
enough, they think, to satisfy the most greedy of 
travellers, and the price of travelling is so cheap that, 
as the whole population lives in boarding houses, it is 
as cheap to be travelling as to be stopping at home, 
if you can apply such a word as home to a boarding 
house. For instance, in these moving palaces, which 
go twice a-day to Albany, one hundred and fifty 
miles, as far as Margate and back again, I paid two 



FIFTEEN MAKE A MILE. 25 

shillings, but I might have gone the same day for 
one shilling, by another boat not quite so new and 
splendid. Only think, to Margate and back for one 
shilling ! "We sate down two hundred to dinner, and 
an excellent dinner we had, but it was two shillings 
each, rather a high price. I noticed that everybody 
drank water. I hardly remember one single cork 
being drawn during the whole dinner ; perhaps there 
was not one ! Now here is a fact as truly astound- 
ing as the vast proportions and magnificent fittings 
of the steamer, and I thought to myself, who can 
stop the progress of a nation that to an unlimited 
extent of fertile land adds these two grand auxiliaries 
of steam and temperance ? Steam has done wonders 
for America and is only in its infancy, and yet omni- 
potent as it is for developing the power and wealth of 
the growing states, yet the universal diffusion of 
temperance is calculated to secure the greatest 
amount of individual happiness. The greatest men 
in America have added the lustre of their names to 
this good cause, and as this has been done from an 
innate feeling of propriety, and not through any 
Father Mathew, it is deserving of the highest admi- 
ration and imitation. Would that the bishops and 
clergy of our dear Britain, a far superior country for 
all classes of Englismen than the best parts of the 
States ; would that our clergy would do as they did 
in America and preach up the new crusade ! Perish 
the gin-palaces rather than that the hard-working 

D 



26 PEOPLE ALL WATER-DRINKERS. 

mechanic and his family should not have the bright 
example of the clergy to encourage them in their 
first efforts to shake off the expensive and suicidal 
habit of drunkenness ! The movement first emanated 
from the clergy of America, that part, the far great- 
est part, which we call dissenters. 

But it is not by preaching that the good came. 
No, the clergy were the first to sign their names, for 
ever abandoning the use of all intoxicating drinks, 
and then their hearers and congregations immediately 
followed. All the preaching in the world would have 
done no good ; but, said they, if we see our minis- 
ter's signature at the head of the list in our town or 
parish, then we will follow with our names ; and thus 
this great reform has been accomplished. But we 
shall have occasion to refer hereafter more at large to 
the practice and moral effects of the temperance 
movement in the United States. I had chosen a 
much too early day in the season to sail up the 
Hudson, but it was the first or nearly so of the 
opening of the navigation, and I had become quite 
impatient to inspect the workings of these elegant 
monsters of the North River. The Americans 
are too apt to laugh at and ridicule our Thames 
steam-boats, and look upon the cockle-shells that 
run to Gravesend and Margate as a very favour- 
ite measure of British inferiority in everything con- 
nected with steam; and certainly, after a visit to 
New York, the best of these boats look paltry in 



AMERICAN STEAMERS. 23 

the extreme, whether the 'Star' or 'Diamond;' and one 
can hardly believe that they are the same boats that, 
previous to going to America, we used to think in 
every way so fine and convenient. But the Ame- 
ricans ought to recollect, that larger boats would 
not be adapted to our rivers, and that we must 
submit, in the one article of river navigation, to be 
excelled by our transatlantic brethren. But it is 
quite the reverse in ocean steamers; there Great 
Britain beats the world, as witness those giants of 
the deep the ' Great Western,' ' Great Britain,' l Pre- 
cursor,' ' Hindostan,' ' Bentinck,' ' Great Liverpool,' 
and a hundred others in the service of private packet 
companies — not to say anything of the steam ships 
of war belonging to Government. There is not an 
instance in America of the man at the wheel stand- 
ing, as with us, close to the rudder at the stern of 
the boat. The helmsman is always perched up aloft 
on the highest deck, where we place our foremast, 
giving him a complete command of all before him. 
There he sits in an elegant office, enclosed on all 
sides with windows, turning his wheel according to 
the direction he wants to steer in: which wheel 
communicates, by means of two rods of iron, about 
three-eighths generally, with the tiller ; and as none 
of the passengers ever see him, nobody ever thinks 
of him, and much less talks to him. 

I ought to have mentioned that, in reference to 
temperance, no family in America would attend the 



28 FIRST PRINCIPLES. 

preaching of a minister who drinks anything stronger 
than tea and coffee ; the Americans cannot reconcile 
the idea of a parson rising from the fumes of whiskey- 
toddy, port, or sherry, falling on his knees in the 
pulpit, invoking the blessing of the Most High, when 
they assemble and meet together ; it would be con- 
sidered a profanation, and looked upon as a sacrilege. 
Even cider must be abandoned, though it is a very 
harmless and agreeable beverage : and the American 
cider is the best in the world, and is besides a source 
of considerable profit to the farmers of New England 
and New Jersey. But " touch not the unclean thing'''' is 
the first principle* and they manfully adhere to it, and 



* The Americans are very fond of first principles, as one may 
see in their advertisements, one of which I cut out of a ' Nashville 
Union:' — 

FIRST PRINCIPLES. 

HPHAT'S my motto, now and hereafter ; and I regret that I ever 
lost sight of it. I had made money and was thriving, when, 
in an evil hour, I let go this wholesale maxim, and lost all in con- 
sequence. I intend to make a fresh start, and go back to first 
principles, with full confidence that my old friends and the public 
will extend a generous encouragement. " Keep thy shop and thy 
shop will keep thee," said Dr Franklin ; I believe it, and shall 
therefore be always found at mine in MARKET STREET, three 
doors from Nichol's corner, opposite the Lion and Mortar, ready 
and able to manufacture all descriptions of COPPER, TIN, and 
SHEET IRON WARE, STOVE PIPES, &c, at short notice, on 
moderate prices, and in the best style of workmanship. 

^" Old Copper and Old Pewter will be taken in exchange for 
every article sold by me. 

January 20, 1843— tf. WM. H. MOORE. 



ARDENT SPIRITS DENOUNCED. 29 

in every respect find it to their advantage. In short, 
they never think of anything but the pure element, 
and the consequence is, that the water every- 
where is paid great attention to, and is generally 
excellent. 

The following was first signed during the late war 
with Great Britain, under the presidency of Madison, 
and was thought, at that period of drunkenness, a vast 
step and a great discouragement to the then pre- 
vailing and national failing of dram-drinking. It 
deserves consideration in the high places of our own 
land; for there can be no question if the money now 
squandered in needless drink were laid out in good 
four-pound loaves and legs of mutton for the Sunday's 
dinner, the poor wives and children of the industrious 
classes would be much better looking, and soon would 
also be much better dressed ; besides the saving in 
time and health ; but we ought in charity to make 
allowance for them, they have no example, their 
preachers only point the way instead of leading it. 

The President's declaration, thirty years ago, 
against spirituous liquors: — 

" Being satisfied from observation and experience, 
as well as from medical testimony, that ardent spirit, 
as a drink, is not only needless but hurtful, and that 
the entire disuse of it would tend to promote the 
health, the virtue, and the happiness of the commu- 
nity, we hereby express our conviction that, should 
the citizens of the United States, and especially the 






SO ARDENT SPIRITS DENOUNCED. 

young men, discontinue entirely the use of it, they 
would not only promote their own personal benefit, 
but the good of our country and the world. 
( Signed) 



r James Madison, 
Andrew Jackson, 
J. Quincy Adams, 



Martin Van Buren, 
John Tyler. 
Jas. K. Polk." 



CHAPTER III. 

Poor Shops — Fire-Engines — Gratuitous System does not answer — 
River Hudson — Bottle of Port charged 32s. 6d. — American Mar- 
kets bad — King of Alleghania — Fruit and Vegetables scarce — 
Punch and Mrs Caudle — Trade in Cheap Publications — Moving 
the Mansion House — Brooklyn Ferry — Freedom without Law — 
Universal Suffrage does not answer — Mob Law — Polk the Great 
Unknown— His roaring means nothing — Annexation of Canada 
— Newspaper Press — Penny advertising. 

Arriving from a Catholic country, it was pleasant 
to observe in this large city no priests, no beggars, 
no soldiers, and no drunken men. The shops in New 
York are, however, very second-rate affairs, there 
not being in the whole city half-a-dozen that have 
any pretensions to elegance or taste, and those be- 
long to foreigners. I hardly ever passed up Nassau 
street without hearing a fire-bell, or encountering 
either a fire-engine or a hose-cart. These were 
always very affecting exhibitions, so much property 
being hourly destroyed by the ruthless element, in- 
stead of being circulated through a happy and indus- 
trious community in exchange for the results of their 



32 FIRE-ENGINES. 

labour! The fire-engines and hose-carts are pro- 
fusely decorated and even gilded, looking a little like 
the sheriffs' coaches in London, but it appeared to 
me a very bad system, all through the chapter ; and 
until it is altered, and a thoroughly efficient fire- 
brigade, with intelligent superintendents, introduced 
by the civic authorities, there will be no diminution 
in the number and extent of New York conflagra- 
tions. The city enjoys, at present, the bad pre- 
eminence of being the most subject to fires of any 
locality in the civilized world. There must be a 
reason for this unenviable distinction, and the muni- 
cipality cannot do a greater service to their fellow- 
citizens than to adopt a speedy remedy. Why not 
appoint a commission of three respectable and honest 
inhabitants, who have already visited Europe, to 
proceed to London and Paris, and report on their 
return to the Mayor of New York the best means 
of preventing and extinguishing fires ? The present 
gratuitous plan will never answer. If the fires in 
London, rare and unimportant as they generally are, 
were left to be extinguished by the apprentices and 
clerks of that city, as they are in New York, no 
doubt London would soon acquire as great a notoriety 
as the Atlantic city, especially if they were not paid 
a farthing for their trouble. Nothing can be more 
praiseworthy than the courage, activity, and zeal of 
the young gentlemen of New York, in pulling these 
Juggernauts of engines through the streets of the 



GRATUITOUS SYSTEM. 33 

city, night and day, and every day ; I have counted 
sixty young men to one engine, when three horses 
would have done the work much better and quicker, 
and the young men might have remained at home in 
their stores or offices. Besides, in stopping a furious 
burning is no judgment required, what measures to 
adopt, whether to pull down or blow up contiguous 
buildings; and who so proper to take this superin- 
tendence as a scientific, experienced, and well-paid 
director of the fire police, upon whom should rest 
all the responsibility of overcoming these frightful 
and constant calamities ? 

The Hudson River is the pride of the Americans. 
It is certainly a noble river, in every way most useful 
and convenient, and is constantly, except when ice- 
bound, pouring the riches of its navigation into the 
great commercial city. It is as wide as the Thames at 
Gravesend for one hundred and fifty miles, and deep 
enough nearly all the way for ships of large burthen. 
We did the voyage in ten hours, including several 
stoppages ; so that our speed could not have been less 
than fifteen or sixteen miles an hour. These boats, 
as they are miscalled, being longer than the ' Great 
Britain,' seldom carry fewer than five hundred passen- 
gers ; and often in the height of the hot season, when 
there is no breathing in New York, seven and eight 
hundred. They also carry cargo, and are considered 
good money speculations, though the fare is only two 
shillings per head. In America they know no dis- 



34 RIVER HUDSON. 

tinctions of first class and second class ; best cabin 
and forward cabin, all is alike. Jack is as good as his 
master, and the fare so cheap that everybody can 
afford to pay for the best. The railroad carriages as 
well as steam-boats in America are like the London 
omnibuses, where a peer of the realm may be seen 
sitting next to a common soldier. And why not ? It 
is pleasant to see that the English are getting rid of 
their prejudices ; they used to think it mean to travel 
in the second class, but nothing can be mean that is 
manly and honest. 

The two striking pieces of scenery on the Hudson 
River are the Pallisades, soon after leaving New 
York, and the Highlands near West Point, about a 
third of the voyage to Troy. There is a small por- 
tion of the Rhine about Bingen that is superior to 
anything on the Hudson, and indeed the Rhine is 
altogether a more imposing and important river ; but 
still the Hudson upon the whole must be considered 
equally beautiful and useful. But the Ohio is the 
finest river in the States, and perhaps in the world, 
take it altogether, and far superior to the Hudson ; but 
we must leave any description of that splendid stream 
until we move to that part of the country. 

I was not sorry to return to New York ; I had 
merely gone up to Troy, as it were, to try my wings, 
and satisfy the craving I felt for an excursion ticket 
in these magnificent steamers, leaving the grand tour 
till the season should be a little more advanced. It 



BOTTLE OF WINE. 35 

was a folly to think of starting for the West before 
the 1st of May, so I had nothing to do but to make 
myself as comfortable as a New York boarding house 
will admit. 

I met by accident an old friend in Broadway, who 
■was surprised and, as he said, delighted to see me after 
nearly twenty years' absence. Englishman-like, no- 
thing would do but I must dine with him at the 

Hotel. Not at the public table, for when two old 
friends meet in another hemisphere, after twenty 
years' separation, they are not satisfied to dine in ten 
minutes, secundum Americanos, and therefore we 
ordered a much worse and more expensive dinner in 
a private room. The dinner, considering the charac- 
ter of the house, which is first rate, was abundant 
enough, but badly cooked, as all dinners mostly are in 
America, for they don't care so much about it as the 
English, and no American ever says a word during 
dinner ; but I should not have mentioned this trivial 
circumstance of dining with an old friend except for 
the following circumstance. On the dinner cloth 
being removed, my friend ordered the waiter to bring 
a bottle of his best port wine. I told my friend that 
it was quite unnecessary, I had drank at dinner, 
mixed with water, all the wine I wished, and more 
than I should have done had I dined at home, and I 
would rather have our chat over a good manilla ; but 
he would not be persuaded. The wine was brought 
and decantered, and I believe more than half drunk ; 



36 AMERICAN MARKETS BAD. 

but judge our mutual astonishment and annoyance, 
on calling for the bill, this said bottle of port was 
charged eight dollars ! The bill was promptly paid, 
and we left the dear hotel with a growl, determining 
never to enter it again. Nearly thirty-five English 
shillings for one bottle of old port ! Talk no more 
of the rapacity of English landlords after this. I 
concluded, of course, that the duty on port wine must 
be enormous in America, but no, not at all, it is 
remarkably low, only six cents, or threepence, per 
gallon, so that the duty on port wine is merely 
a half-penny per bottle. Was ever such a price 
heard of? 

The Americans make a great cracking always 
about their meat and provision markets, the cheap- 
ness and profusion of all the good things of this life ; 
and my young travelling companion, had I been green 
enough, would have almost persuaded me that the 
roasted turkies walked about in all the thoroughfares 
of his country with a knife and fork sticking in them 
crying out to be eaten ! But this is one of the thou- 
sand fallacies that haunt the imaginations of the igno- 
rant, that cannot be otherwise got rid of but by a 
personal inspection of the great metropolitan markets. 
For New York is everywhere called the Great Me- 
tropolis, and the State of which it is the capital is 
as universally called the Empire State. Indeed 
". Empire" is a very favourite and popular term all 
over America, which contrasts oddly enough with 



KING OF ALLEGHANIA. 37 

their democratic principles and manners. But you 
have the ' Empire ' steam-boat, the ' Empire ' engine, 
and the word is employed in a hundred different 
attractive forms, seeming almost to argue a foregone 
conclusion that the love of distinction, so natural to 
the acc|uisition of wealth, will, some day or other, con- 
vert the Atlantic States into the Empire of Allegha- 
nia. As soon as the seat of the General Govern- 
ment shall have been removed to the valley of the 
Ohio or Mississippi, Cincinnati or St Louis, at both 
of which places such removal is expected and at an 
early day, then the great States of New York, Penn- 
sylvania, &c, will begin to think more and more of 
nullification and separation It is not impossible but 
some of the present generation may yet live to see 
the White House at the Federal City, " To be Let." 
But let us take a walk through the boasted markets 
of New York, which amount in number to fifteen, 
conveniently distributed throughout the city. A 
public market is a sort of epitome of a country, and 
may very safely be taken as a criterion of its produc- 
tions. It is true that, at some seasons of the year, 
they are much better furnished than they are at 
others ; but having always made the markets in all 
countries a favourite lounge, I may say that I have 
visited them at all seasons. The Fulton and Wash- 
ington are two of the best supplied and largest ; but, 
beyond the show of beef and potatoes, there was a 
plentiful lack of everything. In the fish way there 



38 FKUIT AND VEGETABLES SCAKCE. 

was little worth having but halibut and bass (salmon 
very scarce and dear),, and a very abundant and coarse 
kind of cockle called clams. But the lobsters and 
oysters are magnificent, plentiful, and cheap. The 
vegetable market is almost a blank, with the excep- 
tion of potatoes and peas ; but if I were to make out a 
list of what they have not got, it would be as long as 
my arm. The lowest neighbourhoods in London, to 
say nothing of her overwhelming markets, but such 
localities as Whitecross street, Tottenham court road, 
the NeAV cut, and Spitalfields, exhibit things for sale 
in the vegetable way that would astonish a New 
Yorker. With the exception of peaches and apples, 
which are deservedly celebrated, the American fruit 
is very scarce and very bad. The latitude of New 
York is the same as Naples, a country whose happy 
soil and industrious sons produce everything in per- 
fection. Grapes of twenty different kinds of colours, 
shapes, and flavour ; oranges, lemons, citrons ; rasp- 
berries, mulberries, and strawberries ; apricots, necta- 
rines, greengages, pears of endless variety and excel- 
lence, melons and water-melons, innumerable and al- 
most for nothing ; olives, figs, pomegranates, prickly 
pears and tomatas, gooseberries, white and red cur- 
rants, beside black, and such cherries as make the 
mouth water to remember ; quinces, almonds, and 
medlars, damsons and plums of every hue, and wal- 
nuts, filberts, and small nuts innumerable. But not 
to speak of Naples, some of these are to be seen in 



FISH AND VEGETABLES SCARCE. 39 

the markets and streets of London every day in the 
year, whilst very few of them are to be seen at all in 
the American cities ; and when they are to be met 
with they are mere abortions, and generally of a 
detestable flavour. The consequence is, that the 
great show of fruit in the Atlantic markets consists 
either of blackberries, whirtleberries, wild cherries, 
pea-nuts, and a dozen other wild fruits, growing in 
the woods, and intended by Providence for the suste- 
nance of the birds and squirrels ! The same remarks 
apply with still greater force to table vegetables. 
Compared with England the supply is scanty, and 
the quality very inferior. The climate does not 
answer for the long list of delicious vegetables known 
to happy England, but to name many of which would 
be almost unintelligible to American readers : the 
same with fish; salmon, turbot, and soles, crabs, 
shrimps, and prawns are, with the exception of the 
first, utterly unknown ; and who would live in a 
" world without soles ! " The other markets are not 
a bit better than the Fulton, and I will therefore not 
describe them The market at Philadelphia 1 found 
on a large scale, and better supplied than any of the 
fifteen markets of New York ; and even at Cincinnati 
the various markets appeared fuller of nice things 
than in the Empire city. 

The Americans are certainly a nation of readers, 
and it is always amusing to walk the principal streets 
and see what a large traffic is carried on in the cheap 



40 PUNCH AND MRS CAUDLE EVERYWHERE. 

publications. The 'Last of the Barons,' or the 
' Smugglers,' is no sooner arrived in New York than 
one publisher strikes off 50,000 copies at threepence 
each, and a rival printer a better edition of 50,000 at 
6d. and Is. The respective authors, however, need 
not reckon much on this cheap immortality ; the 
books are thrown by as soon as read, like their half- 
penny newspapers ; in a little time, if you ask where 
are they, " Echo answers, Where ?" There are no 
private libraries in America, nor are there any circu- 
lating libraries, for it is cheaper to buy than to 
borrow. The London picture newspapers form an 
item, also, very considerable ; and you see { Punch,' 
' Pictorial Times,' and ' Illustrated London News,' in 
the shop windows for sale, as abundantly as they are 
in London. This is not confined to New York, but 
pervades the entire Union, as far as New Orleans ; 
and, whilst the boat was getting up her steam at St 
Louis, at the junction of the two mighty rivers 
Missouri and Mississippi, we had nearly a dozen 
boys on board, with great bundles under their arms, 
singing out, ' Last Lecture of Mrs Caudle ' only one 
half-penny ; No. 20 of the ' Wandering Jew,' and all 
Bulwer's and James's novels, at a shilling each ! 
The boys drive a very lucrative trade in these 
amusing wares ; one youth told me that he cleared 
ten dollars a-week on a capital of only ten dollars ! 
He could therefore dress well, smoke all day, talk 
politics and literature, and have a glass of gin-sling 



MOVING THE MANSION HOUSE. 41 

when he liked ! The American boys begin the world 
with about five dollars' worth of cheap publications 
and travelling-maps, just as the Jew-boys in London 
are turned out to learn the value of money by trying 
to sell a few lemons, slippers, or quills. 

One need not walk through many streets in New 
York without witnessing in one of them a removal 
or lifting up of a house ; this is almost peculiar to 
American mechanics, and I was never tired of looking 
at it. The practice has contributed very much to 
the straightness and uniformity of the streets, and so 
perfectly at home are they at it, that if an advertise- 
ment were to appear in the ' Sun,' the ' Herald,' or 
the ' Tribune, ' to remove the London Mansion 
House to Hampstead Heath, there would be several 
offers for the job. As for the north side of Middle 
row, they would think nothing of removing it bodily 
at once to the Model Prison at Clerkenwell, without 
any of the young misses of the family being in the 
slightest degree interrupted in their usual avocations. 
As for the everlasting and dangerous nuisance of 
Holborn hill, which I have been looking at more in 
sorrow than in anger for these forty years, in New 
York it would be levelled in a week. A worthy 
tradesman in the city of Brooklyn, opposite New 
York, wanted to convert his two parlour windows 
into a shop-front ; " No, no," said the builder, " don't 
throw away your parlour, I will lift the house up, 
and build you a much better, loftier, and more spa- 



42 BROOKLYN FERRY. 

cious shop, where the parlour now stands. The 
screws and timbers were accordingly brought, and I 
saw the two-story brick house go up slowly and 
imperceptibly, whilst the daughters were looking out 
of window, as if nothing was going on more than 
usual. I watched the alteration every time I crossed 
the ferry to Brooklyn, and in the course of two or 
three weeks the tradesman was occupying his new 
and handsome store, as the shops are called. 

By the way, nothing can be better regulated, or 
more complete, than this said ferry across the East 
River from Fulton market to Brooklyn ; the fare is 
one penny to casual passengers, but the inhabitants 
take six-months' tickets at a time for themselves and 
family, which reduces the price to less than a half- 
penny. The boats are most excellent and roomy, going 
every three minutes in the day, and carrying hun- 
dreds of passengers and twenty wheel-carriages each 
trip. The breadth of the river is here 731 yards, 
and the ferry-boat takes you over quicker than you 
could walk across a bridge, if there was one on the 
spot. This is the narrowest part of the East River, 
and a more lively scene on a fine day in April or 
May can hardly be desired than is here exhibited in 
the rapid passing of great steamers, large awkward 
sloops, and ships arriving from and proceeding to 
sea, all invariably with a tug lashed alongside. 

The police of the metropolitan city of New York 
is quite below par, and totally inadequate to the 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 43 

exigencies of the place. Public opinion— the great 
tyrant of* America — is against all interference with 
the rights of man, and consequently they detest 
everybody in authority over them. The Republic 
started with a hatred of foreign rulers, and they 
have gone on till the feeling has grown into a hatred 
of all rulers ; and though the laws are good, nobody 
obeys them, and the executive is too weak to enforce 
obedience. Where this is to end it is impossible to 
say. Universal suffrage is the curse, and will be 
the ruin of America. I used, as a young man, to 
think very favourably of the specious forms of po- 
pular government : but anybody of the slightest 
observation need only travel three or four months 
in the States, to perceive what a fatal mistake the 
wise and good have made in giving up all the real 
power in the country out of their own hands into 
the hands of the ignorant and immoral, and who 
have not a stake in the public hedge, — into the 
hands of a mob, consisting, in the Atlantic cities, of 
a great proportion of wild, savage, and uneducated 
Irishmen. The policemen are not to be distin- 
guished from private citizens till their services are 
wanted, and then they turn up the corner of their 
coat collar and exhibit their badge, just as if the 
metropolitan police in London were to wear their 
A 65 out of sight under their coat collar ! Poor 
fellows, if in America they were courageous enough 
to wear their letter and number outside, as with us, 



44 MOB LAW. 

the sovereign mob would teach them that all power 
is derived from and remains with the people. In 
the same way that a masonic procession, at some 
seasons of excitement, would not dare to walk the 
streets of New York. They would be assailed with 
mud and rotten eggs, because the sovereign people 
have a prejudice against masonry ; and no consta- 
bulary force that they could muster would be effec- 
tual enough to protect them. These are a few of 
the specimens of liberty without law, so constantly 
forcing itself on the observation of the passing 
stranger ; and this insolence of the mob is growing 
so intolerable and tyrannical, that some change of 
measures will certainly take place, and it is not at 
all improbable that the day is coming when the 
Union will be partially dissolved, and even despotism 
welcomed as repose ! 

The St George's Club is formed of a body of 
English gentlemen resident in New York, who, with 
a praiseworthy zeal keep up, as far as they dare, 
the national festivals, and protect, as far as they are 
able, British interests and British emigrants. They 
are a very large and wealthy body, and reckon 
among their number some of the most respectable 
names in New York. 

Yet it was a long-debated question, at the meeting 
convened for the purpose of considering the details 
to be observed at the funeral honours agreed to be 
paid to the hero of New Orleans, the late Andrew 



POLK — THE GREAT UNKNOWN. 45 

Jackson, tchether they should carry the Union Jack, 
and, more important still, who should carry it. But 
as soon as it was determined that the obnoxious 
emblem should be carried in the procession, there 
was an end of all further deliberation, and dozens of 
English hearts immediately volunteered for the ser- 
vice, though it was one of no little danger. But 
the solemn character of the procession prevented 
any popular disturbance, though the ensign was 

repeatedly greeted by " There goes the b y 

flag!" 

We were discussing the inauguration speech of 
Lawyer Polk, which had just come out. Nobody 
knew this man, or anything about him, except that 
at the last election for President in 1841, when 
General Harrison came in against Van Buren, there 
was an obscure young man from Tennessee started 
for the Vice-Presidency — as Vincent, Oastler, or 
Nicholson might do for London or Westminster — 
when Captain Tyler, an acknowledged imbecile, 
gained the day, the numbers standing thus at the 
close of the poll : viz., 

Tyler . . .234 votes. 

Johnson . . 48 „ 

Tazewell . . 11 „ 

James K. Polk . 1 „ 

And an obscure Jew lawyer in a country village 
where the Lucius and Leonidas Polks reside, in 



46 polk's roaring means nothing. 

Tennessee, in a standing advertisement before and 
after the election, thus makes use of his name.* 

Such a decisive blow as one vote only would, in 
most men, have indicated a tolerably broad hint to 
the ambitious lawyer, to retire altogether from fur- 
ther troubling his friends ; but no : the rejected for 
the J^'ce-Presidency, four years after, at the next 
election, actually starts for the Presidency, and gains 
it too, over the most accomplished, most virtuous, 
the best informed, and most suitable man in all 
America ! What must he say, therefore, in his in- 
auguration speech, for such a nattering reception, 
such an overwhelming preference ? Why, of course, 
he must lay it on thick — go the whole figure — flatter 
the worst passions of those who elected him, and by 
all sorts of grand, eloquent, and thundering announce- 
ments about Texas, as unfait accompli, and "Oregon 
ours without negotiation," et cetera, et cetera, et 



* HENRY C. LEVY, 

Attorney and Counsellor at Law, 
Trenton, Tenn., 
"\T7"ILL promptly attend to all business intrusted to his care, 
" ' throughout the Western District of Tenn. 

REFERENCES. 

James K. Polk . . . Columbia, Tenn. 

A. W. 0. Totten . . . Jackson, „ 

Milton Brown „ „ 

N. J. Hess . . . Trenton, „ 

Buckley, Crockett, and Co. . New Orleans. 

Cave and Shaffer . . . Philadelphia. 
October 14. 



ANNEXATION OF CANADA. 47 

cetera, send his kind hearers home satisfied and con- 
tented. But don't be frightened, my Lord Aber- 
deen, it is all tricky inania verba — words full of sound 
and fury, signifying nothing. A mere election after- 
dinner speech, and really and positively not intended 
to cross the Atlantic. When this speech was penned 
the orator had no reference to any other readers 
than his own countrymen, and in justice to Polk 
this ought to be known, that his roaring means 
nothing. 

Still, these silly speeches, electioneering though they 
be, do harm; they confirm and strengthen those 
savage sentiments of the democrats about war with 
Great Britain, and the invincible character of the 
Americans, already so ridiculously puffed up, which 
it ought to be the great aim of a good President to 
subdue ; but I found, go where I would, that the 
same universal feeling in America prevails in every 
state, that they would lick us, as they elegantly call 
it, in about a fortnight ; but if Great Britain could 
stand it out a month or two, that would certainly be 
the extent, when she would fall down on her knees 
before the glorious republic, crying, " Peccavi ! " 
and yield everything — Texas, Oregon, to 54 deg. 48 
min., Annexation of Canada, and pay by instalments 
the expenses of the war, during the payment of which 
she would hold Halifax and Bermuda ! This is the 
feeling all through America. Unfortunately, go 
where you will, in the States an Englishman is known 



48 NEWSPAPER PRESS. 

instantly by his healthy looks, and is therefore 
immediately fastened upon to convince him of the 
greatness of the Union, the everlasting power and 
importance of the greatest people the sun ever shone 
upon. This constant recognition of one as an Eng- 
lishman is under certain circumstances positively a 
nuisance, and as I had just arrived from a tropical 
country, and was also on the wrong side of fifty, I 
had hoped to get along in the crowd, and not be 
dragged into discussions about the eternal greatness 
of Polk and Co. But nothing would do, and I was 
constantly, though the meekest, mildest of mankind, 
subject to the extremes of rudeness, from ladies as 
well as gentlemen, in railroads and steam-boats. 

Everybody, as I said before, reads in America ; 
but it is the newspaper press that is most patronized 
and indulged in. No one grudges a halfpenny for 
the ' Sun ' or * Tribune,' or a penny for the ' Herald,' 
which is the property of a renegade Scotsman, who is 
always running clown everything British, at the same 
time that he is for ever exciting his American readers 
to acts of spoliation and hostility against his native 
country ! But this sort of language is the stock in 
trade of other newspapers as well as the Americans, 
for instance, the ' Constitutionel,' ' Si&cle,' and 
' Presse,' who are all for war, as they can only live on 
events, and a state of peace and national prosperity 
does not produce events. 

" So wretches hang that jurymen may dine ! " 






NEWSPAPER PRESS. 49 

The ' Sun' newspaper states that his daily circulation 
is forty-four thousand, and that it requires and receives 
a new fount of type every fortnight. The paper is 
issued to the boys at three-fourths of a halfpenny, 
and sold to the public at the marked price, one cent, 
or a halfpenny each paper. It is about the size of the 
London papers when single sheets, and it is rumoured 
that the proprietor clears thirty thousand dollars 
annually by the speculation. He of the 'Herald' 
states his circulation at forty thousand, but nobody 
believes hint, though it is well known that he makes 
an excellent living, as far as three meals a day goes, 
from his speculation. But I have heard very hard 
things said of this editor and proprietor, Mr Bennett, 
but whether they are true or only partly so, he does 
not seem to be a very favourable specimen of the 
Scotch character. 

The American papers are generally entirely devoid 
of any pretensions to talent, even the best of New 
York. Their readers don't want to be bothered with 
talent. "British Designs on California," at the head of 
a column, in large capitals, is better than any leading 
article ; and " Petitions in Favour of the Annexation 
of Canada," the following week, in equally large type, 
will carry them through, first-rate, for another ten 
days. " Insolent Behaviour of a British Cruiser on 
the Coast of Africa," set up very conspicuously, will 
also tell ; and these cunning Isaacs know so well how 



50 PENNY ADVERTISEMENTS. 

to dish up their halfpenny meal every morning, that 
they manage to keep the pot boiling. 

But if the American papers have no talent, their 
number is really surprising. If in the United States, 
Peckham would have its Democrat and Whig 
journals, published every morning, writing fierce arti- 
cles against each other ; Tottenham would boast its 
Gazette and Rough Hewer; whilst Hammersmith 
and Turnham Green would be kept in a constant 
state of hot water by the violent leading articles of 

Dr , the editor of the Journal, and Colonel 

, the sole proprietor of the * Mercury ' and i Ad- 
vertiser,' till Acton or Ealing would come in to the 
rescue, in one of their daily morning or evening 
extras, and usually smart articles, and the next day 
there would be a duel on Wormwood Scrubs with 
soldiers' muskets, and one or both of the said editors 
would be shot dead at the first fire ! 

The country papers advertise for almost nothing. 
A man gives notice that he will advertise in one 
hundred and twenty of the leading journals of .the 

State of for less than a penny each, if inserted 

for three months, and he will receive payment in 
wheat, maize, rye, pork, bacon, whisky, feathers, 
bees'-wax, tobacco, hemp, shoes, tinware or eggs ! 
But we must put an end to this chapter, and see if 
the weather is not fine enough to venture up the 
country. 



CHAPTER IV. 

One Church to every Three Hundred Inhabitants — Alterations in 
the Book of Common Prayer — Expected Visit of Queen Victoria 
to America — Nothing Permanent — All the Presidents have died 
Poor — Americans an ungrateful People — De Witt Clinton and 
Whitney — Salaries of Public Men — House Rent enormous — Public- 
Buildings — Paper Currency — Bank-note Engraving a good Busi- 
ness — Fountains — Packet Ships — Ships of British Colonies such as 
New Brunswick — American Navy — Temperance Ships of War — 
Flogging abolished in the Navy — American Boasting — Their 
Geese all Swans — Few learned Men — Abundance of Ice— Igno- 
rance — Where is Goldsmith's Auburn— Russian Climate — Specu- 
lation Mania — New Cities on Paper— Mulberries. 

I found the weather still frosty and severe, and 
very little inviting to country excursions, and there- 
fore postponed my departure a little longer, till it 
should be more congenial. This was the less to be 
regretted, as really New York contains much that is 
interesting, and a walk up and down the sunny side 
of Broadway in the month of April is sure to afford 
amusement, together with abundant matter for re- 
flexion. 

Here is a city, including its suburbs, of four hun- 
dred thousand inhabitants, and constantly increasing ; 



52 A CHURCH 

with one hundred and twenty large hotels; thirty 
banks, issuing their own notes; seventy insurance 
offices ; ninety public schools ; forty-five steam-boat 
companies, and as many different lines of traffic; 
seventy newspapers ; two hundred churches, &c. ; 
and yet, numerous as these churches are, in some 
towns of the interior they are ten times as numerous, 
many of the capitals of the west having one church 
for every three hundred inhabitants, and of course one 
pastor also ; whereas in England it is one church to 
each thirteen hundred inhabitants. This perhaps may 
be considered in excess, but it is one of those evils that 
cures itself, and it is perhaps the best feature belong- 
ing to the voluntary system, that the supply and 
demand for ministers of the Gospel are easily adjusted, 
and if there is no opening in a village for an addi- 
tional parson, the attempt will not be made to estab- 
lish him. The supply through the entire Union may 
be roughly reckoned at one minister and one church 
for every five hundred of the inhabitants, which is 
about double the average on the continent of Europe. 
The Americans are decidedly great patrons of 
religion, and, to a superficial observer, would be pro- 
nounced a most religious people. Sunday is most 
decently observed everywhere, and though they 
have a singular custom in the State of Connecticut 
of commencing the Sabbath at sunset on Saturday 
evening, and finishing at sunset on Sunday, on the 
principle of the evening and the morning being the 



TO THBEE HUNDRED INHABITANTS. -53 

first day, yet in New York Sunday evening is 
observed as it is in London, though the Americans 
will not tolerate any cabs, omnibuses, or railway 
carriages, plying for hire on that day. 

I had been attending the Episcopal Church, and 
joining in the prayers for the President of the United 
States every Sunday. The preacher had a shocking- 
nasal drawl, almost universal in America, and the 
alterations in the liturgy were so numerous as to sur- 
prise me ; though afterwards, and on reflection, many 
of these alterations seemed judicious. The republi- 
cans of the States, following the Church of England 
or Episcopal form of worship, have made sad havoc 
of the Book of Common Prayer, and the words so 
frequently occurring of * King,' ' Prince,' &c., have 
evidently given them much trouble, how to retain or 
to expunge them, without spoiling the whole effect of 
the solemn service of the Church. ' King of kings, 
and Lord of lords,' as applied to the Most High, 
were expressions that could hardly be retained in the 
Republican version of the Book of Common Prayer ; 
although the phrase ' Kingdom of heaven,' being a 
sentence from the Bible itself, has been suffered to 
remain. 

The American hatred of kings and queens is, 
however, becoming less violent every year amongst 
the intellectual and wealthy classes of the commu- 
nity of the great States on the coast — New England, 
New York, and Philadelphia ; and I was repeatedly 



54 EXPECTED VISIT OF QUEEN VICTORIA. 

asked whether it was not probable, seeing that 
Queen Victoria was so fond of travelling, and such 
an excellent sailor, that her Majesty would not, 
some day or other, honour America with a visit. 
If, when she went on board the Great Britain 
steamer, at Black wall, in the spring of 1845, she 
had only made up her mind to engage that vessel 
as a temporary royal yacht for the purpose of visit- 
ing Canada and, that wonder of the world, the Falls 
of Niagara, how the hearts of the American people 
would have leaped for joy at the opportunity of 
escorting her Majesty from New York to the fron- 
tiers, and so on. There can be no doubt the Ame- 
ricans, from so frequently alluding to this probable 
visit of the Queen of Great Britain to their shores, 
were quite sincere, but a good deal of their enthu- 
siasm is attributable to the English sovereign being 
a female, young and beautiful. At any rate, the 
respectable class in America is such a small one, 
that their voice is entirely drowned in the clamour 
of the mob, who are supreme, and are every day 
becoming more and more so. An American mob 
has no veneration for wisdom, worth, station, or 
talent; and for mere title, the circumstance of a 
man being a lord would rather tempt a Philadelphia 
'loafer to throw a brick at his head and finish his 
lordship, for daring to come and insult by his pre- 
sence the free and enlightened citizens of the great 
and glorious republic. 



PRESIDENTS DIE POOR. 55 

Nothing short of anarchy can terminate this la- 
mentable state of things, for the laws never will be 
altered, the law makers being themselves the mob ; 
but some event or other will arise, nothing being 
very permanent in any part of the world, and least 
of all in America, that will bring about a revolution 
in the present feelings of the better classes in that 
country. They will find out, especially when they 
begin to travel to Europe, that we are not such 
fools on this side of the water as we appear to be ; 
that we prefer the peace and good order of society 
to the furious repetitions of corrupt and murderous 
elections, every four years, for the office of chief 
magistrate ; and that, although in theory it may be 
very well to admire cheap and popular governments, 
yet in practice we have found out, especially by 
what we witness in the United States, that there 
is no advantage in democracy anything to be com- 
pared to the vigour of government under a limited 
and constitutional sovereign ; and that the fixed 
order of succession, on the demise of the crown, is 
a thousand times better than that greatest of all 
evils — civil war, which they were very nearly expe- 
riencing lately on the nullification question in South 
Carolina ; an example which, no doubt, before long 
will be followed by some other grumbling and dis- 
satisfied state. 

All the American Presidents have died poor, and 
some of them insolvent ; whilst the widow of one 



56 AMERICANS UNGRATEFUL. 

was only relieved the other day by the purchase of 
her deceased husband's library ! The idea of a pen- 
sion, or half pay, would not be listened to for a 
moment by the free and enlightened : so that men 
of the greatest talent, after wearing themselves out 
in the service of the people, to whom the morning of 
their life has been devoted, are turned out in their 
old age to starve. 

The Americans are truly an ungrateful people. 
Besides the shabby way they have treated all their 
Presidents, from "Washington and Jefferson down- 
wards, look at their shameful neglect of such men 
as De Witt Clinton, the Governor of the State of 
New York, who constructed a work a thousand 
times more arduous and more useful than Sir Hugh 
Myddleton's aqueduct, known as the New River 
from Ware to London ; viz., the vast canal through 
the Mohawk Valley from Albany to Buffalo— as 
many miles long as there are days in the year — and 
yet in a short time, and almost already, his very name 
is nearly forgotten, and in twenty years more his 
countrymen, whom he has so much benefitted, will 
be wondering what in the world De Witt Clinton 
has constructed to be so much remembered and 
honoured by the foreign residents in the State of 
New York — for it will only be among the foreigners 
that his memory will be cherished and esteemed. 

Then there is Whitney, not he of the Oregon 
Railroad, but the great inventor of the cotton gin 



WIIITXEY. 57 

for separating the cotton wool from the seeds, pre- 
vious to packing. But for this beautiful contrivance 
how would it be possible to send nearly three million 
bales of cotton to market. Our readers cannot have 
a conception of the importance of this invention 
without a little consideration; but if they will re- 
collect, that the cultivation of cotton has arrived at 
such an enormous amount in the southern states of 
America, that the present crop would require a fleet 
of one hundred and fifty vessels of one hundred tons 
each to carry the empty bags required for this quan- 
tity, they will have some idea of the number of 
fleets it would require to carry them full ; and yet 
the man who made the great discovery how to get 
rid of the seeds after picking the cotton, was allowed 
to rot and starve, whilst in England he would have 
had a monument to his honour in some public tho- 
roughfare two hundred feet high ! Fulton the same : 
it is all alike ; public services are reckoned as nothing 
under a government of mobocracy. The public 
officers, perhaps the navy excepted, are all so badly 
paid, so thoroughly inadequate to the value of their 
services, that it is almost beyond human nature to 
resist peculation or bribery. The President himself 
receives 5,000/. a year, and the next best paid officer 
receives 1,500Z., such as Secretaries of State. The 
best place in the gift of the new President is the 
American consulship, at Liverpool, whose emolu- 
ments are quite as large, and some years larger, than 



58 ENORMOUS HOUSE RENT. 

the salary of the President himself. The next best 
situation in the President's gift is said to be the 
consulships at Havanna and Havre ; next to these 
the four collectorships of customs of New York, 
New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Boston, who receive 
salaries of 1,500/. to 1,600/. a-year each ; so that 
whilst the head of the state is exercising monarchical 
powers, and starving on his 5,000/. a-year, he is dis- 
pensing considerable patronage to his numerous sup- 
porters who returned him to office. They manage 
things differently in the kingdom of Naples, where 
the Neapolitan consul, when appointed to the Island 
of Malta, is obliged to pay 250/. per annum for his 
place ! 

House rent is extravagant in New York. A shop 
without a parlour, or anything but an empty small 
shop lets for 1,000 dollars a-year, provided it is in 
a good situation ; and for a good business premises 
in the heart of the city, the rent would be as much 
as the salary of the Secretary of State. Indeed, 
there is more than one hotel up the country that lets 
for 20,000 dollars a-year, a rent that cannot be 
paralleled in the same business in any other quarter 
of the world. The Aston House is the principal 
hotel in New York, but the writer did not hear the 
amount of rent ; it is thought by the citizens to be 
a very grand affair, and a model of architecture, but 
this is the science in which the Americans are, of all 
others, the most ignorant. There is not, with the 



PUBLIC BUILDINGS. 59 

exception of the two recent buildings in "Wall street, 
anything worth looking at throughout the entire 
city. A great fuss is made about the new Gothic 
church of the Trinity, in Broadway, but looking at 
the immense sum it has cost, and, if they had em- 
ployed an Italian architect, what might have been 
constructed for so much money, nothing but a feel- 
ing of disappointment and regret comes over the 
spectator on inspecting it. The two buildings al- 
luded to in Wall street, viz. the Custom house and 
the Exchange, would do honour to any city, as they 
are chaste and elegant, while they are solid and sub- 
stantial specimens of the Grecian style. Nothing 
could have a better effect in curing the present inor- 
dinate vulgarity of American taste, than a frequent 
distribution of such buildings over the country. 
These, together with the unfortunate United States 
Bank in Philadelphia, — that grave of ten thousand 
fortunes, — are admirable exceptions to the general 
want of good buildings throughout America. By the 
way, this notorious bank, under the crafty manage- 
ment of Nicholas Biddle and Co., is now converted 
into the Custom house for the Port of Philadelphia. 
Wall street, New York, is, next to Broadway, the 
most interesting thoroughfare in the city. Here are 
many banks, some perhaps not so substantial as the 
granite houses in which they carry on their business, 
but there is an air of wealth and prosperity in it 
from top to bottom. 



60 CURRENCY. 

As there is little metallic currency in circulation 
in America, and nothing to be seen but their filthy- 
rags in the shape of dollar notes, a large branch of 
the business of this street consists in exchanging 
notes for the public, and forcing into circulation as 
many thousand dollars as they can of the particular 
bank each broker is interested in. 

I used to look in at the windows and see the gen- 
tlemen 'with long scissors cutting and clipping the 
quires of new pretty pictures, and making them into 
bundles. It was some time before these were dis- 
covered to be new bank notes, on which they were 
intent upon raising the wind ! They were destined 
for some exchange operation, that should relieve the 
parties ; for although the banks of the Empire state 
enjoy a confidence and reputation unknown in the 
other and remoter parts, yet even here, in New York, 
after a year or two spent in Lombard-street, you 
cannot avoid seeing that all is false and hollow. 
There is not the coin in the country to pay more 
than one shilling in the pound upon the paper circu- 
lation of America, and who will the loss fall upon 
ultimately but upon the industrious and productive 
classes ? It is a great object to have your bank 
notes of the most attractive and newest pattern of 
engraving, as flashy and ornamental as possible ; 
and in justice to the rising arts in America, it must 
be conceded to them, that if most things are but 
indifferently done, this of bank note engraving and 



FOUNTAINS. 61 

printing cannot be surpassed in London itself. It is 
evidently a thriving trade ; and, being well paid, natu- 
rally commands the best workmen. Some of the speci- 
mens are beautiful, although you are sure to suffer 
somehow or other in having anything to do with them. 
Nothing is more wanting than a general law through 
the States prohibiting the issue of all promissory 
notes under five dollars. Some of their coin would 
then be visible ; and the numerous national mints, 
kept up at the expense of the federal government, 
and now doing nothing, a perfect sinecure, would 
then have a chance of earning their salaries, and the 
poor people would cease to be plundered. 

"WTio would have supposed that, in the city of 
New York, with all .their well-known vulgarity and 
want of taste, they would have excelled us in the 
article of fountains and jets d'eau? and yet it is really 
the case. Our jets in Trafalgar-square are very 
sorry concerns compared with those in the Park at 
New York ; for this simple reason, that instead of a 
very short column of water, as in Trafalgar square, 
three or four feet high, in the Park at New York 
the Americans have erected a three-inch pipe, and 
the prodigious quantity of water thus enabled to 
ascend into the air some thirty or thirty-six feet, has 
a grand and charming effect, especially when playing 
during a heat little inferior to the burning fiery cli- 
mate of Senegal. But as so large a conductor as a 
three-inch pipe would require too large a supply of 



62 PACKET SHIPS. 

water, the jets only play at short intervals, which 
is rather an advantage than otherwise. 

But if the Americans are behind the rest of the 
world in architectural knowledge, they certainly are 
not second to any nation in naval architecture. Their 
ships are perfect models, especially the fifty liners^ 
as they are termed, sailing at fixed days, as regular 
as mail-coaches, for Liverpool, London, and Havre. 
They are built as strong as wood and iron can make 
them ; and their speed, form, and decorations, as well 
as their comfort and accommodations, stamp them at 
once as the finest ships that swim the ocean. They 
are generally 1,000 tons burthen each, and may be 
seen at the foot of Wall street every day arriving or 
departing, receiving or discharging cargo. Not much 
inferior to these are the packet-ships, all along the 
shore, in the trade to Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, 
or New Orleans. They are ships generally of 500, 
600, or 700 tons, and are proofs of the importance of 
the coasting-trade, for they are constantly sailing to 
and fro. The cheapness and abundance of sound 
American timber has been the prime cause of the 
excellence of their ships. In England we have not 
got the timber, and if we had we could not afford to 
put it in in such liberal abundance as the American 
ship-builders. 

I went on board one of the new liners ; she was 
ready for sea in ninety days from the day her keel 
was laid down, and cost 16/. sterling, per register 



SHirS OF NEW BRUNSWICK. 63 

ton, everything included, except provisions, and 
sheathed with Muntz's patent metal. Now the same 
ship could not be built at Blackwall within fifty per 
cent, of this price, and yet the Americans are crying 
out every day, and making constant complaints in 
their newspapers, of being undersailed by the British, 
and of the regular annual increase of British tonnage 
in the American waters, carrying cotton, tobacco, 
turpentine, and such like bulky cargoes, cheaper than 
they can do it. How is this ? In the first place 
seamen's wages are lower in English vessels ; but 
the grand reason is, that these cheap vessels are built 
in New Brunswick. They take a cargo of lumber 
to a southern market, and then, calling at either of 
the four principal cotton ports, take a cargo of cotton 
direct to Liverpool, at the same freight that the 
Americans can take it to New York.* 

Ship-building should therefore be encouraged at 
St John's, N. B., and there is room for twenty ships 
additional at this moment to be placed on the stocks 
there of 1,000 tons each, especially if they could- 
be done at a few pounds per ton lower than the New 



• In the year 1844, ending 30th June, the vessels which entered 
the ports of the United States were as follows ; viz . : 



American 


8,148 


British 


- 5,030 


Hanseatic 


155 


Swedish 


110 


French - 


55 



64 AMERICAN NAVY. 

York builders. The ships would be taken in shares, 
and the bird's-eye maple, rosewood, gilding, and 
satinwood, with other gim cracks, being dispensed 
with, there is little doubt they might be completed 
with a profit to the builders for about twelve guineas 
per ton, everything complete, except provisions. 

The guard-ship at New York is the ' North Caro- 
lina,' 74, a very fine ship, built at Philadelphia in 
1820, and consequently twenty-five years old. She 
is about the size and weight of metal of our new 
80's, and would be an ugly customer alongside any 
of our old 74's. She is moored very near to the 
shore, and is a proof that the largest ships have no 
difficulty in coining up close to the city. 

I was rather disappointed to hear that the Tem- 
perance plan had not yet been introduced in this 
fine line-of-battle ship, because I had been informed 
that in the ' Cumberland,' first-class frigate, it had 
been tried with perfect success ; every person in that 
vessel, from the first lieutenant downwards, being a 
total abstinence man, and consequently receiving the 
Government equivalent of threepence per day, in lieu 
of grog. It is said that in two years more the pro- 
bability is that the serving out of rum for sailors' 
rations on board ships of war will be entirely discon- 
tinued, as it may be said to be already effected in all 
the merchant and whaling ships of the Union. 

Here would be a mighty reform, could it be car- 
ried out in the British navy ; and surely the weather 



TEMPERANCE SHIPS OF WAR. 65 

un the coast of America, during their long and severe 
winters, from the Cay of Fundy to Cape Hatteras. is 
as bad as it is in any part of the world ; and if a pot 
of hot coffee or cocoa, after reefing topsails in a 
stormy night, will satisfy an American sailor, why 
should it not be good enough for our English tar.-, 
whose vigorous constitutions and broad shoulders less 
require any stimulus. 

But if this plan of universal temperance has not 
yet been thoroughly organized in the American army 
and navy, there is to every reflecting Englishman 
great satisfaction in observing that by a late Act of 
Congress flogging has been entirely abolished in 
American ships, as well in those belonging to the 
State as in those belonging to the merchant service. 
It would have been more agreeable, perhaps, if Great 
Britain had been foremost in this just work, but it is 
an example that must soon be followed by our own 
legislature ; for nothing can be more impolitic on our 
parts than to leave anything to be envied by either 
British sailors or British colonists in the laws, cus- 
toms, or institutions of our Republican neighbours ; 
but, on the contrary, it should be the aim in 
Downing street, if possible, to make everything 
British or Canadian the envy of the Americans ! 

When we see the rate of seamen's wages in 
America — fifteen dollars per month — it is no wonder 
that there is no scarcity of hands to man their ships : 
for by a late return to Congress it came out, that 



66 AMERICAN BOASTING. 

out of 109,000 men and boys employed in the 
fisheries, rivers, canals, merchant ships, and navy 
of the United States, 100,000 were foreigners, that 
is, British, and only 9,000 Americans ! 

I met with an American traveller who had been 
in England, and had gone on board the e Victory,' 
at Portsmouth, and described to me the brass plate, 
&c, on the spot where Nelson fell. He looked on 
the ' Victory ' as a very small vessel, and stated 
that, alongside of their ' Ohio,' 74, she would only 
have appeared like a frigate ! This is not only 
a specimen of American boasting, but American 
ignorance, two qualities always found together. But 
it is the same all day long, from morn to dewy eve, 
nothing but the same tune — American bragging; 
all their flies are elephants; just as the village of 
Jersey is called a city, and the little grass plot round 
the City Hall in New York is called " the Park," — 
an enclosure about the size of Leicester square in 
London. In like manner, the numerous little boys' 
schools scattered over the country, where the dirty- 
nosed urchins are whipped, or ought to be, once a 
week, are all designated colleges. Thus there are 
more colleges and universities, so called, in America, 
than throughout Europe ; but in the item of pro- 
fessors they are not so rich, there being compara- 
tively very few eminent or learned men in the 
United States. Indeed, there is not much encou- 
ragement for them, and the principal branch of study 



FE"W LEARNED MEN. 67 

all through the country is divinity ; but in the fixed 
sciences, where there is no guessing and no uncer- 
tainties, the number of great names in America is 
very small. Blumenbach and Bezel, Arago and 
Faraday, Liebig and Misofanti of Bologna, who is 
master of forty-two languages, with the galaxy of 
great names at this time in Europe, are not to be 
looked for in the States, and never will be while it 
continues a democracy. There exists no such thing 
as a learned leisure, except in divinity ; of which they 
are very fond, if one may judge from the number of 
schools and colleges of divinity scattered all over the 
country. 

The habits of temperance, even in New York, have 
brought into existence many trades, to an extent that 
would hardly be credible elsewhere. As the people 
have abandoned ardent spirits, and in a great mea- 
sure even ale and porter, something must be had as 
a substitute : and as wine is out of the question, as 
much as it is out of the reach of the industrious 
classes, they have hit upon a number of drinks, 
warranted not to intoxicate, such as sarsaparilla beer, 
and root beer, which are sold at every corner of the 
streets ; whilst the ginger-beer makers drive their 
innocent commodity about the streets, mostly four- 
in-hand, in a very flashy style, sufficiently indicative 
of the prosperous nature of their craft. 

Waggon loads of ice-cream may be seen beset by 
the boys and girls in the street, all having in the hot 



68 CHEAPNESS OF ICE. 

months their halfpenny worth of strawberry or va- 
nilla : nor are the glasses much smaller, or the cream 
inferior to those of Farrance or Gunter at twelve or 
twenty times the price. Owing also to an entire 
absence of duty on green fruit brought in bulk from 
foreign countries, pine apples and plantains are to be 
seen at every corner of the streets of New York ; 
and whilst you see such a profusion of them around 
you, and you are suffering at the time all the pangs 
of the horrid heat, you cannot help fancying your- 
self really in the tropics, till you are awakened from 
your reverie by seeing a long succession of ice-carts, 
full of large blocks of ice from the Rockland lake, 
driving along the streets, selling their weeping and 
evanescent loads at one shilling per hundred-weight ! 
When one sees blocks of ice carried through every 
part of the town like blocks of stone, hot as it may 
be, one feels convinced there is no mistake here ; and 
that, after all, we really are in Russia, notwithstand- 
ing the short burning summer and the aforesaid fes- 
toons of ananas and bananas ! 

Talking of American ignorance, one of their pro- 
fessors — and he had not the excuse of being a divi- 
nity professor, generally the worst informed of all — 
noticed to me that we English were not a manufac- 
turing country ; " you are, no doubt," he added, " a 
great commercial people, but you don't figure as 
manufacturers." I replied that I must have been 
labouring, then, under a great mistake all my life, 



SHOCKING IGNOBANCE. 69 

for I had always thought, if there was any one thing 
for which my country was justly celebrated, it was 
for the greatness and immense value of our manu- 
factures. "Well? said he, "as far as iron and steel go, 
I think you are 'first-rate ' in England, and get 
along better than any other nation that I know of: 
but when I admit that I can go no farther. It is 
France that is the great manufacturing nation of the 
globe!" "What do you think, then," I inquired, 
"about cotton, of which, as an American, you ought to 
know something." " Yes," says he, " you take more of 
our cotton, no doubt, than all the rest of the world 
put together; but then you merely spin it into yarn 
for other nations to work up into those beautiful 
tissues and tasty fabrics that my wife and daughters 
are constantly buying for new dresses. Look at the 
beautiful shoes, the charming gloves, the bonnets 
and millinery which we receive every week from 
Paris, besides those beautiful Indiennes for our ladies' 
dresses, which you do not know even how to make 
in England." Seeing that this professor's ignorance 
was so lamentable and profound (oh, ye blind guides), 
I really disdained the trouble of convincing him. 

It was like an elderly lady in one of the steamers : 
she said she should like to have visited England once 
in her life, if it were only to have visited " Auburn? 
which must be a sweet pretty place, according to 
Goldsmith's description of it — 

" Sweet Auburn ! loveliest village of the plain." 



70 RUSSIAN CLIMATE. 

" Ah ! " said the lady, in a deep lachrymose tone, 
"we have many Auburns in America, but I am 
afraid none of them come up to yours." 

I replied that there was no such place in England 
as Auburn, and it was the mere creation of the poet's 
fancy ; but her mind having dwelt for many years 
on the reality of Auburn, she could with great diffi- 
culty believe me, and I rather think I spoiled for the 
remainder of her short life one of " the greenest spots 
in memory's waste." 

This is like the old story of the woman and her 
sailor son. She knew very well all about the moun- 
tains of sugar, and rivers of rum in the Indies, but 
she would not believe a word when he told her of 
the flying fish ! 

The horrid weather was getting more tolerable. 
What would have been, and ought to have been, 
spring in any other country, was still winter on one 
side of the street, and summer on the other, only 
forty degrees difference of temperature between the 
north side of the street and the south. 

A friend proposed a drive to Jamaica in Long 
Island, and off we started. New York possesses 
many pretty suburbs, of which those in Long Island 
and Staten Island are decidedly the best ; whilst the 
opposite shore of the North or Hudson River only 
presents Jersey city, as the village is pompously 
called, and a place called Hoboken, rather pretty, 
but which they are taking infinite pains to spoil and 



MULBERRIES AND NEW CITIES ON RARER. 71 

ruin. We drove across the excellent ferry previously 
alluded to at Brooklyn, and soon found ourselves on 
the sandy roads of Long Island, which is represented 
as a fertile and productive district, though we could 
see nothing but bush, bad roads, wooden fences, and 
houses. It must be a horrid place in winter. After 
proceeding some miles from the ferry, my friend 
pointed out where many hundred fools had thrown 
away their own or their creditors' money in the pur- 
chase of lots of building land to form another large 
city to be called East New York ! This was about 
1837, as I understood, or eight or nine years ago; 
when all persons were mad, even amongst this shrewd 
and sagacious people, giving thousands of dollars for 
*a piece of ground hardly large enough to swing a cat 
in, expecting to sell it to somebody still madder at 
forty or fifty per cent, advance in the course of 
twenty-four hours ! It was about the same period 
that this thinking people became suddenly convinced 
that to make a fortune it was only necessary to pur- 
chase a certain number of plants of the " morus mul- 
ticaulis," or mulberry from the Philippine Islands ; as 
silk was to be in future, next to cotton, the great and 
important item of American export. But the mul- 
berry speculation, like the East New York and other 
manias, all fell to the ground ; and the poor deluded 
dupes awoke from their dreams to ruined fortunes, 
and to hopes destroyed. 



CHAPTER V. 

New England — Transcendentalists — Their Doctrines — Evils of 
Protecting Tariff— Probable Bankruptcy of Manufacturers — 
Disasters in Steamboats — Their Accommodations — Detestable 
Climate of the States — Cheap Board and Lodging— Hotels— Land 
Bargains — Borne and Syracuse— Bail way Travelling Slow and 
"Wearisome — Tin Booting recommended — Bochester, Bankrupt 
Millers — Palis of the Genessee — Americans a Gloomy People— 
British Plag in Canada. 

Previous to making the western tour I made a 
short excursion to Boston to see a friend off to Eng- 
land by one of Cunard's line of steamers. Our trip 
was partly by sea and partly by land. The boats on 
this line are truly magnificent; but, though occa- 
sionally subject to a little rough weather in Long Is- 
land Sound, they are not exactly cut out for a storm 
at sea, and all classes of Americans must allow that 
John Bull beats them hollow in sea-going steamers. 
The private boats belonging to London and Liver- 
pool, and sailing the ocean, amount, in 1845, to 
100,000 tons; without reckoning any of the superb 
vessels steaming down the Red Sea to Aden and 
Bombay, which, of course, have been navigated round 



TRANSCENDEXTALISTS. 73 

the Cape of Good Hope, or East Cape, the name it 
is better known by amongst nautical men in America. 
I attended the Episcopal Church in Boston, whilst 
my friend visited the Unitarian Church, for the 
Unitarians are a very large and respectable sect 
throughout the State of Massachusetts. The preacher 
made a great impression on my friend by his bold and, 
fearless exposure of the cant and superstition of his 
countrymen, the New Englanders; and he gave me the 
heads of the discourse as much as possible in the very 
words of the minister, who threw in great eloquence 
and earnestness to his address.* I am not sure if I 



* The reverend gentleman's argument ran as follows : — 

1st. Man is by nature a religious being. The religious sentiment 
in him is universal, and as natural to him as sight or hearing. By 
means of this religious sentiment he communicates with the spiri- 
tual world. But when this sentiment has become perverted, or 
mingled with baser elements, it has given birth to various historical 
religions, to use the preacher's words, Christianity among the rest. 
Its legitimate and purified product is absolute religion, which means 
love to man and love to God. 

2ndly. All men are more or less inspired, according to the inten- 
sity of the religious sentiment. No miracles are necessary, nor 
any creeds. 

3rdly. With reference to Christianity, there is no doubt that 
Jesus was superior to all other men, had most of the religious sen- 
timent, and was the most of an inspired man that the world ever 
saw ; his life was consistent, beautiful, and holy ; his precepts wise 
and good, though the substance of them had been uttered before, 
but never so variously and delightfully applied to practical uses. 
As a teacher and model he is unrivalled. But the story of Jesus is 
incredible and absurd ; a mixture of the legendary, the mythical, 
and the true ; a good deal arising out of the love and admiration 
which he rightfully awakened among his followers, and also a good 

H 



74 TEANSCENDENTALISTS. 

am pleasing all readers by giving a specimen of what 
is called by Americans transcendentalism in religion ; 
but it is merely to show the freedom with which 
serious subjects are handled by their best and most 
popular preachers, especially in that section of the 
States called New England, which is generally consi- 
dered the model portion of the United States in edu- 
cation, morals, and religion ; and where all licences 



deal the result of the fanatical expectation of a Messiah, which 
happened, at that period, to be so current among the Jews. 

4thly. The Bible is the greatest of all books ; and it contains 
more of absolute religion than any other book. But the common 
notion of it as divine, miraculous, or infallible, is false and foolish. 
A portion of it is no doubt inspired, in the sense before referred to, 
in different degrees ; whilst other portions are absurd, legendary, 
and incredible. 

5thly. The true idea of the Church is, Christ the model man and 
teacher, and men and women listening to his instruction, and ob- 
serving his life. What is called the Church has answered import- 
ant purposes, but it would be difficult to say whether it has done 
most good or most harm. The true Church is yet to come. 

In another part of his discourse on superstition the preacher ex- 
claimed, " But why go back to the patriarchs ? Do we not live in 
New England and the nineteenth century, and have we no super- 
stition ? Our books of theology, our houses and churches, are full 
of it. When a man fears God more than he loves him ; when he 
forsakes reason, conscience, and love ; the still small voice of God 
in the heart, and is satisfied with authority, tradition, and expe- 
diency, then is he superstitious. We call out against those who in 
an age of darkness were made to pass through the fire, but what 
shall we say to those who now, in an age of light, systematically 
degrade the fairest gifts of man ; who make life darkness, death 
despair, the world a desert, and God an ugly fiend, who made the 
mass of men for utter wretchedness, death, and eternal hell ! Is 
not all this superstition ? " 



EVILS OF PROTECTING TARIFFS. 75 

for the retailing of intoxicating liquors are steadily 
refused. 

I could not spare the time to go over to Lowell, 
alike celebrated for its factory girls and their parasols. 
This is no doubt a very desirable state of things, but 
I am afraid it is merely accidental and temporary, 
and rather an episode in the history of the manufac- 
tures of the New England States, than to be regarded 
as the natural superiority of the American factories 
over those of Lancashire. The day is coming when 
the workers of cotton in Lowell will be no better off 
than the workers in shoes in Lynn, or the cunning in 
clocks. The parasols will have to be furled and left 
at home. The unnatural propping up of the manu- 
facturing system through the silly tariff of 1842 has 
made many fortunes, especially in the New England 
States ; but the repeal of said act, which is certain, 
sooner or later, and perhaps the very session now 
commencing, will make as many bankrupts. The 
cotton-trade will be as good after the repeal of the 
tariff as it is now, but those who have been leaning 
on the support of those prohibitory duties will find, 
as soon as such support is withdrawn, that they must 
become insolvent, unless they evince the energy of 
humbler manufacturers in other departments, and are 
determined to undersell the world ; for, with unlim- 
ited water-power, the raw material at their door, and 
bread and meat for next to nothing, who can beat a 



76 PROBABLE BANKRUPTCY. 

Bostonian at making calico ? So that, after all, we 
see that these Lowell parasols have been paid for by 
the agricultural States, by the gallants of the 
southern and western country, without their knowing 
it, and without acknowledgment on the part of the 
young ladies of the factories. But all that must be 
changed ; it is absurd to suppose that the planters of 
New Orleans and Mobile should have to contribute 
in every article they require at the store to the 
already overgrown fortunes of the New England 
manufacturers, who have been boasting, the last three 
years and upwards, that they have been clearing 
twenty-five per cent profit on their capitals employed, 
whilst all the articles produced by the planters, parti- 
cularly cotton, have been gradually getting lower 
and lower in price ; and even yet, cotton has not seen 
its lowest. So that it will be one good thing done 
by southern preponderance in the national councils of 
the Union, that the tariff is to be reduced to a 
revenue standard. 

The American legislators should observe, that 
every session the Parliament of Great Britain is ad- 
vancing in the free-trade principle by removing duties 
on imports ; and they should recollect that it is now 
well established, that it is an unchangeable law of 
human nature that the real interests of all nations 
are identical. No manufacturing country wants 
paupers for customers : but, on the contrary, all 



D] -ASTERS IN STEAM-BOATS. 77 

nations find it for their advantage that all the others 
should flourish — all derive benefit from unrestricted 
intercourse, free exchange, peace, and justice. 

\Ve were now steaming up the beautiful river 
Hudson, on our way to Albany, at the rate of fifteen 
miles an hour, with two or three hundred passengers 
— a hundred more or less can hardly be distinguished 
in these capacious vessels. A dreadful accident had 
occurred but a few days before by the striking on a 
rock of the steamer ' Swallow,' opposite the town, or 
city (I beg its pardon), called Hudson, by which 
many passengers were drowned ; and it was truly 
a melancholy sight to see the wreck lying broadside 
on the rock. It was the fault of the pilot : for the 
captain, it appears, has nothing to do with the care 
of the navigation, but every boat is left in the charge 
of a pilot, who sits up aloft near the head or bows 
of the vessel, in a neat little glass office, monarch of 
all he surveys, and by means of his only companion 
— a large wheel — he steers the ship in safety. Un- 
like our steamers, where the helmsman always stands 
at the stern, and can see nothing but the passengers 
hats, the American steersman always occupies an ele- 
vated little room on the top deck, close to the head 
of the vessel, and enjoys an uninterrupted sight of 
everything before him and around him ; and as he 
is shut in with the windows of his little office, up or 
down according to the state of the weather, nobody 
can talk to him or interfere with him, and nobody 



78 THEIR ACCOMMODATION. 

scarcely knows that there is such a being on board. 
He has two, or sometimes three, little bells that ring 
in the engine-room, by which he communicates his 
orders to the engineer, such as " Go on," " Back 
astern," " Easy," " Stop her," &c. 

The lowest room in the steamer is the dining- 
room, a long and spacious saloon, communicating 
with the kitchen on deck, through a sort of spout, 
by which the dishes are sent hot from the fire. The 
deck over the saloon contains the ladies' cabin, a 
large and handsomely furnished place, in which a 
hundred ladies might sit or lounge without being 
at all crowded; the remainder of this deck is for 
promenading fore and aft all through the vessel ; and 
you see in gilt letters over various rooms on each 
side — " Captain's room," " Clerk's office," " Barber's 
shop," " Bar," for the sale of fruit and drinks ; and 
very often may be seen three or four well-dressed 
itinerant merchants, who, in the true spirit of Ame- 
rican enterprise, as they are going a journey of 
business, begin at the beginning, and, whether it be 
umbrellas, type for marking linen, &c, they manage 
to do a little trade, and pay their current expenses 
by selling their respective wares amongst the pas- 
sengers. 

After looking a little about me at Albany, which 
is the county town as we should call it, or capital of 
the State of New York, I took the ears, as the Ame- 
ricans say, and pushed on to a nice quiet supper and 



CHEAP BOARD AND LODGING. 79 

glass of brilliant pale ale at the town of Schenectady. 
I enjoyed a good bed at the inn, and in the morning, 
when I was dressing within, it was snowing without. 
Talk of an English winter, here we were in the 
month of May and the weather like Christmas, in a 
latitude corresponding to Tuscany and Spain. It 
could not be the great elevation of the country, 
either ; for the town of Schenectady is rather flat and 
low, and very little raised above the tide-waters of 
the Hudson. The fact is, the American climate is 
thoroughly and irredeemably bad — the very worst in 
the world — that is within the temperate zone ; and I 
conceive nothing can make up for this dreadful and 
important defect. 

Whilst enjoying mine ease in mine inn, more from 
contrast with the weather than any intrinsic excel- 
lence, I did not feel very impatient to go from my 
warm room into the snow ; but here is another city, 
as they call it, a village of six thousand inhabitants, 
and yet boasting of ten churches, four banks, and 
twenty hotels ! The number of hotels will naturally 
surprise Englishmen, because this abundance is uni- 
versal, however small the city, town, or village : 
they swarm everywhere, just like doctors and law- 
yers. The case is, the American people have no 
homes; there is a dinner provided, for instance, at 
each of these twenty hotels of Schenectady, and all 
the adult male population of the place, and a great 
part of the females too, agreed with Mr Boniface, 



80 HOTELS. 

the keeper of the hotel, for partial board at so much 
per month; sixpence per head per meal is a very 
common rate of payment up the country ; and fa- 
milies, even with three or four children, find this 
system of assembling for their three meals cheaper 
than keeping servants and cooking at home, buying 
fuel, &c. The lowest rate of board, including lodg- 
ing, that I have ever met with was at a place in 
Indiana, where a person may obtain both at the low 
price of four shillings per week, or one dollar ; but 
I was to recollect that this did not include chicken 
fixings ; but for fifteen dollars per month, or four- 
teen shillings per week, a good bed room and three 
abundant meals daily may be had in any of these 
cities of the west, — and at a really respectable hotel. 
It is the numbers alone which enable them to do 
this, for they usually pay excessively high rents, and 
can reckon on nothing coming in the way of profit 
on wine and spirits, which is so large an item in the 
calculations of English innkeepers. The traveller is 
also saved all gratuities to servants. This abominable 
English custom would not be tolerated a day in 
America. 

Through various little places along the valley of 
the Mohawk I arrived at the Little Falls, which is 
a pretty place ; and, from its unlimited water-power, 
is sure to maintain its manufacturing importance, as 
a great deal of it is still unemployed and available to 
new comers. 



LAND BARGAINS. 81 

After stopping and admiring this singular little 
spot of perfect wildness, I proceeded to Utica for the 
night ; which, after the numerous little places, ap- 
peared a large and populous town of about fifteen 
thousand inhabitants. I had often in another part 
of the world observed the word " Utica " branded 
on flour barrels ; and it now appeared that the town 
was the centre of a large agricultural country, and 
that grist mills was a favourite speculation of the 
inhabitants. I was the more surprised, therefore, to 
recollect having been teased in New York to buy a 
farm in the neighbourhood of Utica, at a very low 
price ; the copy of the advertisement referring to this 
said farm I thought worth adding in a note below.* 

As I had never yet seen any farm in America that 
I would have taken as a gift, with the condition of 
making it my residence, it was not very likely that I 
should be solicitous to encounter the half-thawed 
mud of Herkimer county in particular, to examine 
this extraordinary bargain. 

We passed through Rome without knowing it, 
and soon arrived at Syracuse ; a considerable town, 

* LOOK at THIS — 160 ACRES of GOOD LAND, water 
right, and all on a river for 130 dollars or less, and believed to be 
worth 1,000 dollars — a fortune, the title from the State of New 
York. Necessity compels the owner to give this away. Any 
man, woman, or child, who has that amount can never meet with 
such a bargain ; half of the lot can be had. Call and make an 
offer— it must be sold— at No. 90 Nassau street, 2nd floor. Also, 
twenty farms from 400 dollars and upwards. 19 2is* 



82 RAILWAY TRAVELLING 

with the usual liberal supply of banks, churches, and 
hotels. This is the most celebrated place in the State 
of New York for the manufacture of salt, of which 
immense quantities are constantly being despatched 
to all corners of the country. Not being particularly 
enamoured, however, of salt marshes, I joined the 
same train, and preferred resting for the remainder 
of the day at Auburn, twenty-six miles further. 
Twenty-six miles is nothing on an English railroad, 
but in America it is quite far enough to weary and 
fatigue you after fifty-three miles of previous travel- 
ling. 

The line is a single line, with occasional turn-outs, 
which cause enormous delays of waiting ; and the road, 
not being enclosed, seems to be the favourite resting- 
place for cattle, who will persist on going and filling 
themselves in the sloppy pastures, and then coming 
to the high and dry railroad, to lie down and chew 
the cud. Then there is such a hollobaloo to make 
the cows get up and run off the rails ; so that when 
you take out your watch at the end of your journey, 
you find that you have just travelled at the rate of 
nine miles and a half to ten miles an hour, including 
stoppages ! I have constantly observed through the 
States, how careless the constructors of their lines 
are of the safety and convenience of the passengers ; 
within an inch or two of a precipice is just the same 
to them, so as they can save a few yards, not of rails, 
but of what we should call hoop-iron, screwed on to 



SLOW AND WEARISOME. 83 

the wooden rails. This recklessness I observed first 
on leaving Syracuse for Auburn, and afterwards on 
the railroad from Lewistown to Niagara Falls. 
Arrived at Auburn, pretty well tired of railroad 
travelling, at the rate of ten miles an hour. This 
place had been represented to me as a large, hand- 
some, and important town in the midst of the lakes, 
abounding in trout, &c. &c. &c. I found it an ex- 
cessively dull place, without trade and without 
money ; and could not by any possibility exist, were 
it not for the little circulation of cash caused by 
keeping here about seven hundred convicts in the 
State prison, the daily labour of whom is let out, by 
public tender, at so much per head for the contractor 
to make the best he can of; they are therefore made 
to work hard, which is perhaps the greatest allevia- 
tion to their sentence, whilst their labour is more 
productive than in our penal colonies, and amply 
repays the cost of their maintenance. The presence 
of this American Newgate in f Sweet ' Auburn 
throws a damp over the place, which, already dull 
and gloomy from want of trade, does not seem to 
promise to make much progress. The Court-house 
is a pretty object, and looks very well, with its cupola 
covered over with tin plates. I cannot help thinking 
that this method of covering steeples of churches and 
cupolas of other buildings might be tried in England 
and Scotland. After leaving this dull village of 
Auburn the railroad crosses the Cayuga Lake, on a 



84 ROCHESTER BANKRUPT MILLERS. 

rickety sort of wooden viaduct, nearly two miles 
long, and which you feel glad to get to the end of. 
After passing another large lake, called Seneca, and 
the village of Geneva, which is a tolerably pretty 
place with ten churches, three banks, two newspa- 
pers, and about 2,500 inhabitants (!), you arrive at 
Canandaigua, built on the edge of the lake of the 
same name. The Americans look upon this locality 
of Canandaigua as the ne plus ultra of everything 
sublime and beautiful, and the town is constantly 
described in their guide-books as presenting the most 
delightful prospects in the world ; but, as our readers 
are long since aware that their flies are all elephants, 
a discount of full 75 per cent, must be taken off from 
every American description of the interior of his 
native State. After seven hours' weary travelling by 
rail we had accomplished seventy miles, and arrived 
at what we looked upon as the end of our journey 
for the present, the town of Rochester, which is a 
bustling and flourishing place near the banks of Lake 
Ontario. It is the growth of little more than twenty 
years, and already contains a population of 20,000 
persons. This rapid increase has been owing to the 
cataract in the very centre of the town, which is 
powerful enough to turn a hundred mills; and 
Rochester, in consequence, has become one of the 
most important flour-markets in the States. Indeed, 
these falls of the Genessee river, beside their immense 
utility and value, are exceedingly fine and imposing ; 



FALLS OF THE GENESSEE. 80 

like all falls where there is great depth and plenty of 
water, and no person of common feeling, or with a 
grain of taste, can tear himself away from such a 
scene as this till he is wet through with the spray, or 
reminded by some thundering bell that it is twelve 
o'clock, and he must run to eat his dinner at the 
public table, whether ready for it or not. I could 
not help regarding the town of Rochester with some 
degree of favour, everything was new and yet sub- 
stantial, and the banks had never failed, a statement 
that could hardly be made of any town of equal size 
out of the State of Xew York. It was not thought, 
however, that the flour business was a good one, as a 
great many of the mill-owners were known to have 
compounded. But after all, the go a-head principle 
of America, though eminently rife even in Rochester, 
is not attended with so many marks of the false and 
hollow as are to be seen in other places. The inha- 
bitants were even better-looking and healthier, and 
the rapid departure of winter gave a cheerfulness to 
everything around, except the dull and gloomy 
American, who rarely smiles and never sings, but is 
always cogitating; and, by chewing great quantities 
of tobacco almost without knowing it, he fancies his 
wits will be sharpened, and some lucky thought will 
occur to him by which he can make ten or twenty 
dollars. As the American towns are so nearly alike, 
and I had enough of railway travelling for the present, 
instead of taking the usual route to Buffalo, I pre- 

I 



86 BRITISH FLAG IN CANADA. 

ferred driving down to the steam-boat, and having a 
cruise on Lake Ontario, looking once more on that 
abhorred flag on the Canadian shore, 

" That has hrav'd a thousand years, 
The battle and the breeze ! " 

The drive from the town down to the embarking 
place is short, but highly picturesque and beautiful; 
and there was the black steamer in the deep stillness 
a hundred feet below the road, nigroque simillima 
cygno, whilst close behind her were the glorious and 
foaming Falls glittering in the last rays of the setting 
sun. It was one of those soft hours that melt the 
heart of the worn traveller, when nothing satisfies 
him but the wonderful works of God, and when he 
cannot help inwardly exclaiming, for his Ave Maria, 
" Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days 
of my life !" 






CHAPTER VI. 

A VISIT TO CANADA. 

Lake Ontario— Falls of Niagara— Clifton Hotel— Heavy Shower — 
Toronto and Hamilton good Towns — Lower Canada, or Canada 
East, must be avoided, not adapted to English Farmers — Too 
cold — Emigrants should not stop till they reach Toronto or 
Hamilton in Canada West, or Upper Canada, as it used to be 
called— Superior to all other Colonies — No Failure of Crops — 
Near England, and Passage cheap — Land ought to be reduced to 
One Dollar per Acre, and no Credit — Few Taxes — Loyal People 
— Quebec and Montreal— Large Population — Healthy and Happy 
Colony — Too many Irish — Far better than any of the Newgate 
Colonies of Australia — Superior to the United States, where 
Englishmen cannot sell Land -Free and Popular Government 
— Cattle, Horses, and Sheep— Regret at leaving Canada. 

During the night we had crossed the Lake Ontario, 
and at daylight found ourselves at anchor at Queens- 
town, close to Brock's Monument in the River 
" Niagara," with the shores of the two great rival 
nations within half a mile of each other. It formed 
no part of my plan to visit the Grand Falls on this 
occasion, but I could not resist the opportunity, as 
we were only twelve miles off, and almost within the 
noise of their thunder, whilst the entire river was 
gurgling and bubbling, even at this distance, plainly 



88 LAKE ONTARIO. 

telling of the fearful leap it had taken about two 
hours before it arrived at Queenstown, and from 
which it was now recovering, The mighty River St 
Lawrence, or Niagara, as it is called for twenty miles 
between the lower lakes, pours more fresh water into 
the ocean than any other river of the globe, although 
it is only fourth or fifth in point of length. 

The train was off to the Falls on the American 
side, and it was about the worst twelve miles of rail- 
way travelling I ever experienced, and in some parts 
positively dangerous, passing by precipices that might 
easily have been avoided, and on the other side going 
so close to the river bank, and the yawning abyss 
about one hundred and eighty feet below, that a 
young English lady near me was compelled to shut 
her eyes, she was so agitated, till we arrived in the 
village and stopped at the Cataract Hotel, the best 
American house, for breakfast. 

We had caught a glimpse of the glorious Falls 
from an opening in the forest, whilst the train was 
passing, but nothing could stop us, immediately we 
alighted from the carriages, from hastening to the 
best and favourite spot for viewing this awful and 
stupendous sight. The American side, though far 
inferior to the Canadian in the importance of the 
Falls, offers in the early morning the pleasing sight 
of a constant and noble rainbow, perfect in every part, 
stretching from side to side, and thus we have the 
sublime and beautiful at the same moment. A visit, 



NIAGARA. 89 

for the first time, to the terrific scene of Niagara is an 
era in a person's life, and can never be forgotten by 
any distance of time or place. 

The Neapolitans have a familiar saying, " See 
Naples and die," meaning, don't die before yon 
have seen" Naples ; but it might much better be 
said, See Niagara and die, for nothing exists in 
this world of wonders half so overwhelming as this 
fearful scene. I used often to think, in travelling 
to Piedmont, if a man could not learn a lesson of 
humility between Scarena and Limone, amidst the 
mighty maritime Alps, he could learn it nowhere ; 
but since seeing Niagara, I think the lesson of 
shrinking into nothing can nowhere be so well 
enforced as beneath this living and liquid Alps. It 
is only a fortnight's trip from Liverpool to Niagara, 
by steam to Boston, where there is a railroad all 
the way, through Albany, to the Falls ; and any time 
during the four months of May, June, July, and 
August, would do to start in. The Clifton House, 
on the British side, is one of the best hotels to be 
found in any country ; and it is a wonder how so 
many and such splendid establishments can be 
maintained during so short a season, as the summer 
in this part of America can hardly be said to endure 
more than three months. On another occasion, 
when I visited the Falls later in the year — it was 
on a Sunday — I reckoned there were one thousand 
strangers and visitors on the Canadian side alone, 



90 . CLIFTON HOTEL. 

to view the Giant Horse-shoe Fall. This is a 
great number for so thinly-peopled a district; and 
in the visitors' book of names, besides the signatures 
of Lord Durham and Lord Morpeth, there are 
persons from Calcutta and Ceylon, the Dweller 
from Mesopotamia,* and the remotest countries of 
the world. The Clifton Hotel has about seventy 
windows looking on the smoking cauldron, and on 
the top of the building there is 1 an elegant and com- 
manding Belvidere, from which you enjoy a pano- 
ramic view of the rapids above the Falls, and the 
wide expanse of river, and Navy Island, together 
with the scene of the ' Caroline ' American steam- 
boat, which was cut out by the British from her 
moorings, and sent down the Falls ; but it would be 
almost impossible for any large vessel to arrive at 
the Falls without first being broken into ten thou- 
sand pieces by the rocks above. 

Our open carriage, on returning to the steamer at 
Queenstown, drove through Drummondville in a 
heavy shower of rain, during which we all put up 
our umbrellas, when the driver told us it was not 
raining, and nothing but the spray from the Falls 
carried in that direction by the wind ; and we after- 
wards learned at Toronto, forty miles off, that the 
white cloud above the Cataract of Niagara is seen 
every clear morning from that city ! A Londoner 

* Mr Buckingham. 



TORONTO AND HAMILTON GOOD TOWNS. 91 

would think it a grand sight to see the River Thames 
tall from the top of the monument; but Niagara is 
a collection of two hundred rivers as large as the 
Thames, flowing into those four interior seas called 
Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior, the smallest 
of which is large enough to contain all England and 
Wales! We joined a pretty English steamer at 
Queenstown to an early dinner, and in the evening, 
after thirty miles of lake-sailing, we landed at 
Hamilton, a very thriving, well-situated, but 
drunken town, at the head of Lake Ontario, contain- 
ing about 12,000 inhabitants. Everything appeared 
rough, prosperous, cheap, and abundant; those who 
abstained from ardent spirits were good-looking and 
healthy ; whilst a four-wheeled chaise and pair of 
horses seemed to be universal amongst the popula- 
tion both of town and country. Beef, mutton, and 
pork are 2id. to 3d. per lb. ; ham, 4d. ; bread, the 
very best, 6d. the 4lb. loaf; milk, Id. per quart; 
fresh butter, 5d. per lb. ; very fine green tea, 2 s. per 
lb. ; and coffee, 6d. ; tobacco, 4d. per lb. ; clothing 
and house rent as cheap or cheaper than in England ; 
potatoes and lake fish excellent and very cheap; 
furniture also very cheap and good. 

Hamilton is a good harbour, and well situated 
under a ridge, or mountain, as they call it, of lime- 
stone, and is the key to a wide and fertile country 
to the north and Avest, and is sure to go on increas- 
ing in prosperity. The soil is superior to anything 



ft 

92 LOWER CANADA WILL NOT DO. 

we have any notion of in Great Britain ; and the 
young wheat and clover were the finest looking I 
had ever seen in my life. 

The population of Canada West exceeds 600,000 
persons, and is decidedly the most important and 
thoroughly English colony under the Crown. Al- 
though the cold is severe, and the winter long, they 
consider it Italy itself as compared with the Quebec 
country, where a pail of water, in less than an 
hour, is converted into a solid lump of ice the shape 
of the pail, without a drop of moisture remaining ; 
and the milk is brought to market in bags and sacks, 
every separate block of milk being scribed with a 
knife or a nail to mark the price ; whilst the half- 
finished tumblers of brandy and water, left on the 
tavern tables overnight, are all solid ice the following 
morning ! In Canada West matters are not so bad 
as this, even in the most severe seasons ; and, gene- 
rally speaking, the soil is drier and better drained 
than any of the Western States of the Union. So 
that with a view to emigration, if people will emigrate, 
which nobody should do if they can anyhow manage 
to "get along" at home, — to use an American phrase, 
— they had better go at once to Canada West, and 
not stop till they reach Toronto or Hamilton. Lower 
down the climate puts emigration out of the question. 
Settlers might as well go to Russia, or Siberia. The 
Home District, Niagara District, Gore District, Lon- 
don District, and Western Districts are the five best 



CANADA WEST SUPERIOR. 93 

and favourite spots in the Province. There is land 
enough for generations to come, and every year a 
residence is becoming more and more tolerable. In 
any of these districts, if they will build their log- 
house high and dry, and take the pledge against in- 
toxicating drinks, they cannot fail to lead a happy 
life. The settler in Canada West must not expect 
to live without work, but he should recollect that 
the state of labour is the very condition of enjoy- 
ment here, as everywhere else ; and if the settler 
were compelled to pass his time in the lazy ease of 
a dull country life, he would indeed be wretched. 
It is nothing but health and labour that prevents 
him from moping and having the "blues." The 
writer has visited the Cape of Good Hope colony, 
and seen the settlers there ; they enjoy a rude abun- 
dance of the necessaries of life, live in a fine climate ; 
but, taking it altogether, it does not offer the advan- 
tages of Canada West. He has also visited South 
Australia or Adelaide, but he gives the preference 
much to Western Canada; — he has also examined 
both sides of Van Diemen's Land, the Hobart Town 
and Launceston divisions of the island ; and, though 
the climate is excellent, he prefers Western Canada, 
even if there were no convicts in Van Diemen's Land. 
The writer has also traversed the whole of Port Philip, 
through the Morumbidgee and Bathurst country, to 
Sydney, which is undoubtedly a fine sheep country, 
but he infinitely prefers the five districts he has named, 



94 NO FAILURE OF CROPS. 

in Western Canada, to any and every part of New- 
South Wales ! The settlers are easier and happier 
in Canada West, they form a much better society 
together, they are kinder towards each other, and 
are not so taken up in squabbles and law as they 
are in New South Wales. The writer also visited 
New Zealand, to see how emigration was likely to 
answer in that distant quarter : and he need hardly 
state, though it is a fine soil and climate, New Zea- 
land must not be thought of for twenty years to 
come at least, unless the emigrant has any wish to 
be made into mince meat by these savages. There- 
fore Canada West is the best place, and from To- 
ronto and Hamilton, round by St Catharine's to the 
grand river as far as London, are all first-rate places, 
and farming and farm labourers in any of those quar- 
ters will do well. The whole triangular peninsula of 
Canada West, situate between the three great lakes 
of Ontario, Erie, and Huron, is a rich elevated plain, 
containing twenty millions of acres of as fine land as 
any in the world ; and w T hen the emigrant gets down 
to the shores of Lake Erie, in the Talbot District, 
to Windsor and Sandwich, and the country opposite 
to Michigan, the climate is much warmer, where 
tobacco is cultivated with facility, and the wheat is 
excellent. 

Though the winters are severe in Canada and 
most parts of the United States, yet it is a great 
consolation to the farmer that the seasons are re- 



CHEAP PASSAGE TO CANADA. 95 

gular, and that if he sows he will most likely reap ; 
but at the Cape Colony sometimes, and very often 
in Australia, there is a failure of the crops ; the four- 
pound loaf is sold for twenty pence and two shillings, 
till a fleet of ships has brought food for the farmer 
from Calcutta, Java, and Valparaiso. Nothing of 
this kind of calamity ever happens in Canada West ; 
and another comfort, the settler has generally got a 
friendly neighbour within a ten minutes' walk of 
him. The hay harvest seldom or never fails in 
Canada ; whilst inferior oat hay has often been sold 
in Sydney at 20/. per ton, or 10s. and 12s. per truss, 
and flour at ten guineas per sack ! Besides, Canada 
West is an older and more populous country, having 
nearly 600,000 inhabitants, which is five times more 
populous than Australia ; which is, besides, about 
the same size as Canada West — that is, in the settled 
parts. 

The summer emigration to this magnificent but 
hitherto mismanaged country ought to be one thou- 
sand persons every day for one hundred days, not to 
arrive at Montreal before the 6th of May, and con- 
tinue till the first week in August, after which emi- 
gration to cease till the following spring. There are 
too many Irish already in Canada West, and they do 
not make the best settlers, being fond of lingering 
about the towns and taking their chance of picking 
up a living round the taverns and drinking-houses. 
The settlers ought to be confined the first year or 



96 CHEAP L^ND. 

two to English and Scotch. The price should be 
21. per head for adults, and 20s. each for others, 
nothing but bread and water provided ; and 
the ships should be Government steamers of the 
largest class, which would perform the run out to 
Quebec in fourteen clays. If land were sold to these 
emigrants also at a dollar per acre, or four shillings, 
and it ought to he cheaper than in the States, where it 
is universally a dollar and a quarter, and the same 
system of payment enforced, viz., ready money down 
for the whole amount, the fine province of Canada 
West would soon muster a million of British sub- 
jects, and then the Governor-General should be 
raised to a Viceroy, with the power to confer hono- 
rary distinctions on wealthy and influential colonists, 
his salary doubled, and other popular measures in- 
troduced to the farthest limits of the province. The 
tariff in Canada is a very bungling affair as it exists 
at present, and it might be altered very much to the 
advantage of the people and Government ; and this 
measure ought to be adopted without any loss of 
time, as at present it is glaringly absurd and faulty. 

No gratuitous emigration should ever be encou- 
raged towards our Canadian possessions ; and if par- 
ties cannot by frugality and saving manage to raise 
21. each for themselves, and 20s. each for their boys 
and girls, they would not be likely to make very 
good settlers. 

Toronto is a large, bustling, cheerful, and wealthy 



FEW TAXES. 97 

city, containing twenty-four thousand inhabitants, 
but it is a sad drunken place, and there is no part of 
her Majesty's dominions where the influence of some 
Father Mathew is so loudly called for and required. 
The trade or importance of the town does not seem 
to have suffered by the removal of the seat of Govern- 
ment ; on the contrary, building is going on in all 
directions, as indeed it is in Hamilton, a town about 
thirty miles further west, to which place there is a 
steam-boat every afternoon. 

Toronto has an excellent harbour, formed by na- 
ture, and enclosing a sheet of water large enough for 
some hundred vessels. There are a great many rich 
persons living on their fortunes, and in the winter 
season the military and better classes of the inha- 
bitants keep up a constant round of visits and fes- 
tivities. Everything is English, whilst the spacious 
streets, substantial houses, and handsome stores, make 
it preferable to even Rochester or Albany. The 
Americans, however, find fault with the want of 
progress made by the Canadian population, alleging 
that, Avith their great advantages of soil and climate, 
the absence of taxation, and a strong Government, 
they don't go a-head so fast as the Americans ; whilst 
the Canadians reply that they are more slow but 
they are also more sure, and if there is more commer- 
cial and manufacturing prosperity apparently in the 
opposite town of Rochester, about the same size as 
Toronto, there is double the number of monied men, 

K 



98 CANADIAN LOYALTY. 

say worth 20,000/., in the Canadian town that there 
is in Rochester. This is a question in which I think 
the Torontoites are very likely to be in the right. 

It cannot be concealed that there is no love lost 
between the rival nations. If the Americans affect 
to look down on the Canadians and their sleepiness, 
the Canadians, on the other hand, thoroughly despise 
the Americans, and all their smart and swindling 
tricks to get money, from wooden nutmegs down- 
wards to fortunes in land sales, and other bubbles. 
The Canadians appeared to be everywhere almost 
w/^ra-royalists and loyalists; and British connexion 
and British rule they never dream of escaping from. 
Why should they ? To be swallowed up, of course, 
by absorption into the great and increasing union, 
which, the faster it grows, the surer it is to be dis- 
solved or undermined. To overthrow it from with- 
out would be impossible, and any attempt of that 
kind would only strengthen their institutions, and 
rally all dissentients for their defence. 

I did not on this occasion venture to Montreal, but 
looked forward to visit it in a more advanced part of 
the summer. We had just received information of 
the burning of Quebec, and it is not a pleasant sight 
to see a city in distress. 

Quebec, as all my readers know, forms one of the 
most striking and most beautiful pictures in America. 
It is one of the strongest fortresses in the world next 
to Gibraltar, contains 30,000 inhabitants, and in June 3 



LAEGE POPULATION. 99 

July, and August, you may relish either strawberries 
or mosquitoes, in singular perfection. The quick- 
silver here enjoys the singular prerogative of a wider 
range than, I believe, in any corner of the earth, it 
having been known as high as 103 deg., and in winter 
37 deg. below zero, making altogether 140 deg. of 
variation. Nevertheless, amongst the French habi- 
tans of Quebec there is a stronger feeling of love of 
their "country than perhaps among any race of men 
living, whilst their good humour and constant cheer- 
fulness is better worth to them than all the maxims 
of philosophy. 

But Montreal is the great capital of Canada, is 
double the size of Quebec, and contains 60,000 inha- 
bitants, is the seat of Government and the Legislature, 
and one of the most commercial cities in America. I 
was not sorry to get back to my snug quarters in 
Hamilton, from whence I made sundry excursions 
, into the bush, and along the plank road. Thinking 
I was going to settle among them, I had daily offers 
of beautiful farms, more or less improved, some as 
low as 10s. per acre, up to 51. and 10/. an acre, whilst 
20/. per acre was asked for some suburban spots on 
the plank road. The buildings about the towns and 
along the roads all seemed warm and substantial, 
though it was a pity to see such hundreds of pretty 
places for sale, and no buyers ! This can only be 
owing to a falling off of emigration, occasioned by the 
late Canadian troubles, which are not likely to occur 

LoFC. 



100 TOO MANY IRISH. 

again, and therefore the field of enterprise, being so 
unlimited in Western Canada, there is no doubt the 
roaming portion of our English emigrants will prefer 
that country, especially as they can get the English 
newspapers only a fortnight old, by way of Boston, 
which is a great advantage over every other colony, 
and there will be a constant demand for all their 
surplus wheat, ashes, and timber. 

The total population of the province of Canada 
West is nearly 600,000, as follows : viz. — 

Natives of England - 60,000 

Ditto Ireland - 100,000 

Ditto Scotland - 45,000 

Ditto French Canada - - 14,000 

Ditto Canada West - - 280,000 

Ditto United States - 39,000 

Other foreigners - 14,000 



552,000 
This table exhibits rather too large a preponder- 
ance of the Irish, and as they are never worth a 
potato when they arrive in Canada, no wonder that 
so many fine farms remain unsold for want of buyers : 
whilst Australia has been receiving rich emigrants 
from England, for the last twenty or twenty-five 
years, to the extent of some millions of money-capital, 
there is more of happiness, ease, and competence, in 
the fortunes of the Western Canadians than will be 
found in New South Wales for generations to come. 



CANADA WEST, A HEALTHY, HAPPY COLONY. 101 

Board and lodging is written up in many of the 
towns of Canada at six shillings per week, and there 
being a great deal more silver money in the country 
than in the States, comparatively speaking, the wages 
of labourers and mechanics is better than in the 
States. This I became more and more convinced 
of in my subsequent trips through the Western 
country. 

I don't know whether you cannot hear as pure 
Irish at Toronto or Hamilton as at the steam-boat 
wharves or piers in New York, where you certainly 
hear it in perfection; and why, because there are 
70,000 sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle domi- 
ciled in the Empire City. This accounted for always 
seeing the e Nation ' newspaper stuck up at the 
bookshops for sale, along with ' Punch ' and ' Mrs 
Caudle,' after every arrival of the Liverpool steamer. 

The Americans, in their excessive hatred of Eng- 
lish greatness, power, and justice, — 

" She hates that excellence she cannot reach," — 

are always looking, every arrival, for the breaking 
out of the revolution in Ireland, and the election of 
King Daniel to the vacant throne. This is an event, 
sooner or later, which they look upon as certain to 
happen, and they cannot account for its being so long 
delayed. The state of the sister kingdom, and the 
overwhelming magnitude of our national debt, leaves 
them no room to doubt that the delenda est Carthago 



102 EMIGRANTS SHOULD AVOID 

must shortly come to pass, and then will be their 
time to pay off their old scores against Great Britain. 

But to return to Canada West : large as we have 
seen the population to be, yet, in comparison to the 
extent of country, it is nothing. Whichever way 
you travel, the country, with few exceptions, presents 
nothing but one vast forest ; and in the more imme- 
diate neighbourhood of the towns and villages, the 
little clearings, dotted over with the black stumps of 
trees, only proves how much remains to be done by 
the sturdy emigrant labourer, as soon as he arrives in 
the country. 

I repeat, therefore, that if my countrymen of 
England will emigrate, don't let them throw away 
themselves and their scanty means by going to the 
Cape of Good Hope, or any of the Australian colonies, 
or New Zealand ; but, by all means, go to the best 
parts of Canada West, where they will find the soil 
fertile beyond their expectations, the seasons certain 
and regular, and the climate healthy ; besides which, 
it is a cheap and abundant country, without taxes; 
whereas, if they should emigrate to the United 
States, which is called the Land of Freedom, they 
will be insulted for being Englishmen ; where taxes 
are high, clothing very dear, produce very low, and 
nothing but fever and ague to welcome the settler ; 
and, the best of the joke, not half so much freedom 
as in Canada ; and what with the constant nuisance 
of Yankee swindling and Yankee swagger, the Eng- 



AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES. 103 

lish farming emigrant would find it impossible to get 
on ; lie would soon find out he was no match for 
American smartness, and, as the usual course after 
being ruined is to take to whisky, this is generally 
the finish of English agricultural settlers who emi- 
grate to the States instead of going amongst their 
own countrymen in Canada West. Besides, the 
Americans, with all their wickedness, put forward — 
like most rogues — the greatest pretensions to reli- 
gion : the country is inundated with preachers of a 
thousand different sects, — for preachers must live as 
well as other trades, — whilst that sort of crotchety 
nonsense does not exist in Canada, where the people 
attend the churches with propriety and decency, and 
the exhortations of the clergymen leave no room 
to doubt that they are influenced by a rational and 
elevated piety, instead of the gibberish of an Ame- 
rican camp meeting. 

Many Englishmen have emigrated to the towns 
of the American Union with success ; but they have 
been either clever in manufactures, or in trades con- 
nected with manufactures, such as dyeing, bleaching, 
calico printing, &c, or clever in iron working, min- 
ing, or finding coals, &c. ; but I look upon it as an 
impossibility for an Englishman to succeed in the 
United States, who should go out singly, with 
capital, to turn his attention to mere tillage farm- 
ing ; and my advice to Englishmen is, never to 



104 FOKEIGNERS CANNOT SELL LAND. 

attempt such a step, unless they wish to be ruined 
in double-quick time. 

An Englishman may buy land as much as he 
pleases, in America, but the law has been so framed 
that he cannot sell it till he has been residing in the 
country some six or twelve months : because no 
foreigner — as an Englishman is called — can give a 
title to land, and no person will buy from a foreigner ! 
An Englishman, therefore, in order to sell a farm 
worth perhaps only 100/., must previously renounce 
his country, obtain letters of naturalization, and take 
the oath that he is a true American citizen ! 

No, no, Canada is the place ; a thousand times 
preferable to the United States for the farming 
emigrant ; and there is enough of the popular ele- 
ment mixed up with the Government of Canada to 
satisfy the most radical reformer, as a proof of which 
it may be stated, that in ordinary times the Govern- 
ment is not felt — the people are left alone to pursue 
their own roads to fortune and happiness, and the 
Government never interferes with them. The whole 
business at Government house, Montreal, for this 
immense territory, is managed by the secretary ; and 
though Lord Metcalfe is a first-rate man, full of 
years and experience, it is quite understood that 
Mr Higginson, his secretary, is the real Governor 
of Canada : thus happily proving how little there is 
to do, and how well it must be done ; for except 



CATTLE AND HORSES. 105 

now and then, at an election, in which a few heads 
are certainly broken, and a great deal of rum is 
consumed, the people don't seem to care much about 
politics, and only desire to be let alone. 

After visiting Dundas, Glandford, Ancaster, &c. 
as far as the Grand River, I drove over by a much 
worse road to St Catharine's by the Welland Canal 
to Drummondville and Chippeway, and I must say 
I never saw any bad country during the whole 
trip. The soil everywhere is most productive, and ' 
the cattle and horses excellent. It is nothing but 
justice to the good Canadians to say, that it would 
be difficult to find any of their live stock out of con- 
dition. They seem, Like all good farmers, fond of 
their horses, and go where you will, it is a common 
sight to see the humblest-looking settlers driving 
their wives or sisters out, with a pair of horses that 
would not disgrace Regent street. There is an air 
of comfort about the appointments and dwellings of 
a Canadian settler, that must not be looked for in 
our remote and Newgate colonies of Australia. The 
only thing in which Canada does not enjoy all the 
advantages of our Eastern colonies is in the article 
of sheep. Owing to the climate, sheep and cattle 
cannot be kept out in their natural pastures all the 
year ; they must be sheltered in-doors for five months 
in winter. But so they must in Saxony, where wool- 
growing is carried on to large profit. So that, if the 
Canadians would aspire to this branch of agricultural 



106 EEGEET AT LEAVING CANADA. 

industry, they must take a leaf out of the German 
sheep-farming, and erect proper sheds for their Me- 
rinos. On a small scale it will not pay, but when 
carried on to the extent of five hundred or a thousand 
breeding ewes, of the best Saxon blood, the Cana- 
dians will find it highly profitable. 

The land also in the Western districts is highly 
adapted to the cultivation of beet, and as the settlers 
are so distant from the coast, sugar manufactories 
from beet would yield fortunes to the growers and 
boilers ; for sugar will never be very cheap in the 
Western and London districts, and the refuse, after 
pressing out the juice, is still good for hogs and 
cattle. 

It occupied an entire day to drive over these 
indifferent roads from Hamilton to the Falls of Nia- 
gara, where we alighted at the Pavilion Hotel, and 
revelled again in this most stupendous of all Nature's 
works, which the oftener you witness the more you 
admire and tremble. 

Whether sleeping or waking the cloud and tumult 
of the ceaseless foam is always rising up to heaven ; 
as loud and as incessant as the cries of the three 
millions of our torn and mangled fellow-creatures, 
held in a state of slavery in the sugar and cotton 
States of the falsely called Land of Freedom opposite, 
some sections of which I was now about to revisit. 
So, Canada, farewell ! 

Happy and healthy colony, may you long go on 



A FAREWELL. 107 

and prosper in the successful cultivation of your 
peaceful fields : content in the pure and simple plea- 
sures of a country life, you have no cause to envy 
the feverish existence of your Republican neighbours, 
but, on the contrary, the day is coming when they 
will envy you. Farewell ! I leave you with regret, 
and shall always look back upon your fine country 
with increasing interest and aiFection ! 



CHAPTEE VII. 

RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES, 

Return to the States— Blackrock and Buffalo— Large Steamers- 
Cheap Living— Cheap Carriage — Cheap Travelling — Penny a 
Mile per First Class Trains— Town of Chicago 30,000 Inha- 
bitants—Inland Navigation — Cleveland pretty Place — Building 
without Money— Paying Wages Ditto— American Lighthouses 
all Gratuitous — Speaker of the House — Propellers — Plucking 
Geese — Ohio River — Prosts every Month in the Year — Pire com- 
fortable 4th July — Cheap Coal — Disasters of English Emigrants 
in Illinois — Taking in the Britishers — Better to have gone to 
Canada — Road to Oregon — Peoria — Port Madison — Prairie du 
Chien— Memphis. 

To such a scene as the Niagara Falls, it is impossi- 
ble to say, Farewell. It is ever present to the imagi- 
nation, and, if as old as the patriarchs, the spectator 
would remember it in all its awful character. 

After taking an early dinner at the village of 
Chippeway above the Falls, we embarked on board 
the British steamer for Buffalo, a short trip of two or 
three hours up the stream of the Niagara River. 
The shores on both sides are low, and the British 
appear to most advantage, the high road skirting the 



'empire' steamer. 109 

river, and no lack of travellers trotting and driving 
along. Houses and inclosures were also neat and 
numerous, but all was strictly rural; whilst, as we 
approached Blackrock and Buffalo, there was a greater 
appearance of speculation in mills and manufactories 
on the American side of the river. The Americans, 
from their general habits of temperance and early 
rising, and unceasing diligence and industry in the 
pursuit of wealth, have much more to show than the 
Canadians in buildings, but the genius of the inhabi- 
tants on the opposite sides of this dividing stream are 
strikingly different, and every year becoming more 
so ; so that in time this river, not half a mile wide, 
will separate two nations as different as the French 
and English, separated by the narrow channel between 
Dover and Calais. 

We were now entering the harbour of Buffalo, 
crowded with magnificent steamers, built on a dif- 
ferent plan, but not at all inferior, to the great 
steamers of New York. 

When I thought of the ' Sapphire ' and ' Ruby,' be- 
longing to Gravesend, and the ' City of Canterbury ' 
and her sister-boat, that used to carry us in days of 
yore to Margate and Heme Bay, it was very humi- 
liating, and enough to make the Englishman blush 
for his inferiority; but only for a moment, till he 
recollected that the English waters would not admit 
of boats of larger construction. 

I have no doubt that the two boats ' Empire ' and 

L 



110 CHEAP LIVING. 

' Wiskonsln ' could have hoisted up half the fleet of 
1 Star ' and ' Diamond ' steamers as easily as South- 
seamen hoist up their whaleboats ; the saloon of the 
( Empire ' being three hundred feet long, and as hand- 
some and convenient as experience and upholstery- 
could make it. Buffalo is certainly a striking place ; 
a bustling place, and it is eminently an American 
place. I saw boarding and lodging announced at six 
shillings a week, and casual entertainment at sixpence 
per meal, the ^zue-pound loaf of best wheaten bread 
at sixpence, and the best pale ale I ever drank in my 
life, as good as Bass's, Hodgson's, or Allsop's, at six- 
teen shillings and sixpence per barrel, or less than 
sixpence per gallon 1 But though Buffalo is a place of 
twenty thousand inhabitants, rents were moderate, 
many houses to be had as low as 40/. per annum. 
Trade was dull and no money to be seen, everybody 
was complaining of the hardness of the times, and 
yet the hotels were crowded, and the steamers for 
Detroit and the upper lakes full of passengers. 

As in all the Canadian towns, particularly Toronto 
and Hamilton, I saw oyster-shells everywhere, so 
they abounded in Buffalo ; for, though they must all 
be brought four hundred miles by rail, and half as 
many more by steamboat, yet carriage is nothing in 
this country, in consequence of the immense facilities 
and competition in canals and railroads, and nobody 
thinks of the expense of conveyance. Thus over the 
Alleghany mountains, where the railroad passes the 



CHEAP TRAVELLING. Ill 

summit of 2,500 feet above the terminus at Philadel- 
phia, the heavy canal boats, the very boats, instead 
of being emptied of their cargoes, are carried over 
the mountains, boats, cargoes, and all, without being 
disturbed, and hoisted upon the rails, so little do 
they regard the expense of carriage. 

I walked into a store at Buffalo for the sale of 
cheap publications, a great trade everywhere, as I 
have observed before. ' Punch ' and ' Mrs Caudle,' 
the ' Nation ' and the London pictorial papers, were 
exhibited to much effect outside the shop, which was 
not kept by a native. He informed me that every 
person in Buffalo was complaining of business, except 
himself; and from the constant custom which he had, 
and the abundant stock which he kept of all sorts of 
American editions of English standard works, there 
appeared some truth in his assertion. When one can 
buy Bulwer's last novel for sixpence, and if in a news- 
paper form, the whole three volumes for threepence, 
no wonder this is a thriving trade. e Martin Chuzzle- 
wit,' and all the most popular works of the most 
popular authors, are the same price, from sixpence to 
a shilling in the book form, large octavo, and double 
columns, small type, and inferior paper; but in the 
form of the ' Examiner ' they are only threepence. 
The Americans are decidedly a reading people ; but 
they could not find time to read so much if they were 
not also a travelling people. 

Travelling in America is just as cheap as stopping 



112 PENNY A MILE FIRST-CLASS TRAINS. 

at home. As the people are all, more or less, anti- 
renters, they live in boarding houses, and as soon as 
they leave the expense ceases, and they begin board- 
ing in a steamboat instead of on shore. 

For instance, the steamers at Buffalo, the best of 
them, go twice a day to Chicago, 1,050 miles up the 
lakes, for \l. 12s. ; and three meals a day, good sub- 
stantial meals, and an excellent roomy cabin to your- 
self to sleep in, besides a splendid saloon and prome- 
nade. This is less than one halfpenny per mile, 
board and lodging included ! And as the voyage 
occupies five days, the total expense is about 65. 6 d. 
per day in a steamer, more like a ship of the line than 
our steamers. The railroad fare is one penny a mile, 
first class. 

Buffalo must be a cold place in winter, and every- 
body admitted it. Its progress has been sudden and 
rapid, as there was hardly a house in the place twenty 
years age. It is the point from which produce is 
forwarded to the Atlantic cities, and manufactures 
and groceries sent back in return. Though five hun- 
dred miles from New York, it is considered nothing, 
and persons of very humble circumstances never 
regard the expense of long journies in America, 
they really are so very trifling. 

Buffalo, besides being very cold in winter, is also 
much exposed to the fury of the lake (Erie), and a 
winter's hurricane from the west will, some day or 
other, sweep the lower part of the town away, and 



POPULATION OF CHICAGO 30,000. 113 

cause damage that will require millions of dollars to 
make good. This should be looked to in time, when 
the requisite defences against the lake might be made 
at less than half the expense. 

But rapid as the rise of Buffalo has been, it is 
nothing to the great town at the other extremity of 
the lake, called Chicago, which in a few years, and 
before the people in Europe had ever heard of it, 
contains 30,000 people, and bids fair to be one of the 
most important cities of the Union. It is situate in 
the state of Illinois, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, 
and commands a very short and easy water commu- 
nication to the River Mississippi, by means of the 
Illinois and Michigan Canal, exactly a hundred miles 
long, and now in course of finishing. For, notwith- 
standing the bankruptcy of the State of Illinois, the 
London capitalists have recently advanced the requi- 
site funds to complete the canal, which, if any canal 
in the world could be expected to pay, it is this. 
The steamers from New Orleans to the south, and 
from Buffalo to the north and east, meet, all but this 
hundred miles; so that it would have been almost an 
act of suicide, having gone so far with their loans, 
not to go a little further and endeavour to make this 
one work at least productive, which it is sure to be 
as soon as finished. So that, by the summer of next 
year, a person may leave New Orleans for St Louis 
on the Mississippi, by steam 1,800 miles, then join a 
smaller steamer for Peru, at the head of the Illinois 



114 INLAND NAVIGATION. 

Eiver, three hundred miles more, then by a packet- 
boat through the canal, one hundred miles, to Chicago, 
when he goes all the way to New York by steam, 
2,600 miles further ; making the entire distance about 
4,800 miles of uninterrupted water-travelling through 
the interior of a continent, a greater distance than 
exists even in India or China, or even Mr Birchell's 
voyage through South America from Para at the 
mouth of the Amazon, up the Topayos and down the 
Paraguay to Monte Video, at the mouth of the 
River Plate. This was not so long as the American 
river communication from New Orleans to New 
York by way of Chicago. 

From Buffalo we proceeded by one of these 
steamers to the city of Cleveland. As I wished to 
see the intermediate places, it was necessary to se- 
cure a berth in one of the inferior boats — the largest 
class of newest steamers, such as the e Empire ' and 
e Wiskonsin,' not condescending to stop at such paltry 
places as Dunkirk, Erie, Ashtabula, &c, all which 
and many more on the southern or American side of 
Lake Erie we visited, and found, to our regret, that 
they were paltry places indeed. In the afternoon 
we arrived at the long-looked for city of Cleveland, 
and took up our quarters at the ' Franklin ' — a very 
good hotel, and reasonable, in Superior street. The 
principal streets are named from the surrounding 
lakes, ■ — Ontario street, Michigan street, St Clair 
street, Huron street, and Erie street ; and the town, 



BUILDING WITHOUT MONEY. 115 

being built on the rising ground, overlooks the lake, 
and vessels may be descried many miles off, ap- 
proaching or leaving the port. Cleveland is con- 
sidered one of the pattern cities of the Union — a sort 
of modern Athens, as the dirty dwellers in Auld 
Reekie like to call their capital. 

But everything was very dull in this model city. 
No trade, and no money stirring; and they were 
beginning to fear they would have a very dry season, 
and a failure of the hay crop. 

They were just laying the foundations of a large 
hotel in an excellent situation in the main street, 
just above the ( Franklin,' with a dozen shops or stores 
underneath. 

I mention it because the contract was remarkable. 
The entire building was agreed for at 100,000 dol- 
lars, in a district of country where all materials and 
labour are extremely cheap, — bricks at 16s. per 
1,000, and timber almost for nothing, whilst stone 
for heads and sills was in great abundance, — so that 
100,000 dollars, under such circumstances, is a large 
estimate for one building. The peculiarity in the 
contract, usual enough in America, was that the 
work-people were not to receive a dollar in money. 
Every Saturday night the wages were to be settled 
for by orders on the various shopkeepers — butchers, 
bakers, grocers, clothiers, drapers, and shoemakers — 
or rather promissory notes, payable only in shop 
goods, were to be received in full payment by the 



116 AMERICAN LIGHT-HOUSES. 

various mechanics, who have most likely by this 
time, October, 1845, got the roof on. It is a new 
and peculiar way of building a block of houses, 100 
or 150 feet frontage, and could hardly be thought of 
in England, where it would be an illegal way of 
payment. Nevertheless, this is the way in which 
the boasted American cities have sprung up like 
mushrooms ; and when we hear in England of brick- 
layers' labourers obtaining four shillings daily wages, 
we ought on the other hand to remember, that it is 
not paid in silver money, but in trowsers, teapots, 
or any of the extremely numerous things that an 
industrious mechanic does not want. 

I must say that Cleveland is rather a genteel — 
not at all an American word — and a very quiet 
place : though it must be a dreadful place in winter, 
for it was piercingly cold though nearly in June. 
There is a lofty light-house at the end of one of the 
streets, to direct the vessels on the lake at night ; 
and down below, in the filthy and sickly part of the 
town, or harbour, there is another light-house to 
enable steamers to enter between the piers. 

The American Government are rather liberal in 
light-houses, which are very numerous all along the 
coast of the Atlantic, in the Gulf of Mexico, and 
along the shores of the lakes. They are well ma- 
naged, and kept up very efficiently and economically 
at the same time ; but although they cost the general 
government a large sum every year, they are like 



ENGLISH LIGHT-HOUSES. 117 

roads and 1 ►ridges in France, quite gratuitous ; and 
captains of ships, foreign or native, have nothing to 
pay in America for light-money. This is in Eng- 
land a very serious charge, and increases the expense 
of travelling considerably. Besides, the Honourable 
Board, who are the legal recipients of this heavy tax 
on shipping, are responsible to nobody, and there- 
fore the public do not know what becomes of the 
money. Amongst the numerous reforms of the day, 
may we not look, as a relief to commerce, to have 
light-money abolished? The safety of the English 
coasts affects everybody, as well as the captain and 
owner of the ship; the underwriter, the merchant, 
and each individual of the community ; and the 
English Government should never be ashamed to 
take a hint from the Americans. On the writer's 
plan, of leaving nothing to be envied in the American 
Republic, not a session of Parliament should be 
allowed to pass without throwing open the navi- 
gation of the English seas without payment for 
light-houses. Mr Hume should look to this, if our 
powerful Premier has too much work upon his hands. 
I made an acquaintance here with a mean-looking 
young man who was squirting his tobacco saliva in 
every direction,— one of the most frequent and odious 
nuisances in the United States, — when, to my asto- 
nishment, he told me he was Speaker of the House 
of Representatives ! Had he been speaker at the 
debating club at the Pig and Whistle, it would have 



118 PROPELLERS. 

been a grave announcement ; but to find my friend 
exercising such high legislative functions as Speaker 
of the House of Representatives was what I was not 
prepared for. He was a thorough-going democrat, 
and had been highly useful to his party in helping 
to return Mr Polk, and was just proceeding to head 
quarters to claim his reward. Whether he ever ob- 
tained anything or not I never heard. 

There is a large traffic on Lake Erie and the 
upper lakes, in the conveyance of all sorts of goods, 
and the lowest classes of Irish and German emi- 
grants, by means of propellers, as they call them, or 
sailing vessels with a small steam-power attached, in 
case of calms or adverse winds. The rates of freight 
and passage by these vessels being only two-thirds 
of the regular steamers, they obtain plenty of busi- 
ness; and as dispatch is the soul of all American 
commerce, and "the summer ends too soon," there 
are no sailing vessels on the lakes without the ad- 
dition of steam, and then they are called "pro- 
pellers." 

Ohio is one of the finest States of the Union, and 
in proceeding across it, from the lake to the Ohio 
River, there was a great progress visible in every di- 
rection, both in tillage and grazing. A large portion 
of the fat cattle of this State are driven to Phila- 
delphia and sold at twopence halfpenny per pound, 
whilst a much greater number are driven to Cincin- 
nati, and sold at half the price for salting. 






PLUCKING GEESE. 119 

In sheep-farming the American farmer appears to 
be behind the rest of the world. They are a long- 
tailed, dirty, small, and coarse-wool breed, straggling 
about without a shepherd in numbers of fifty or 
sixty, and must be more trouble than profit. But 
the hogs are worth looking at. They are reared in 
large numbers, and in the town of Cincinnati there 
are houses where they slaughter and salt down a 
thousand in a day. Geese are also universal, not 
merely in Ohio, but throughout the States, and may 
be reckoned by millions. The people do not seem 
to care much for them, however, as a dish at table ; 
but they are kept chiefly for the repeated crops of 
feathers which they afford to the small settler; 
feathers being everywhere received as money at the 
stores in town in payment for goods. Whether the 
geese admire this periodical plucking or not, never 
enters into the imagination of the owner, any more 
than cutting off his slave's ears in the cotton States 
troubles the drivers of Alabama or Mississippi. 

The travelling by land is always bad, but the far- 
ther you remove from the Eastern States the worse it 
becomes ; the roads once made receive little or no 
repairs ; small holes increase to serious impediments : 
and the stage-coaches are very rickety affairs, threat- 
ening every now and then to send the passengers 
sprawling on the road, or over the precipice. 

The approach to the Ohio at the town of Beaver 
is charming, quite as good as anything I remember 



120 OHIO RIVER. 

in Europe. The descent is, however, rather trying to 
the nerves of ladies ; you look down into the abyss 
from the mountain-road, and, whilst you would will- 
ingly prefer walking, the driver cannot stop, and you 
are obliged to trust to the chapter of accidents for 
your ultimate safety in reaching the bottom. 

The Americans have nothing that they may so 
well be proud of as this magnificent River Ohio ; and, 
if one could only forget the dreadful climate, a sum- 
mer of Senegal and a winter of Siberia, it would be 
impossible not to desire to possess some of the lovely 
spots on the banks of this shining stream. But as 
our landlord at the e Sun ' observed, " Hot as it is, sir, 
we have a frost every month in the year," which I 
had no difficulty in supposing, for I passed the great 
and glorious Independence day, the 4th July, on 
board a steamboat on this River Ohio, which was a 
foggy, frosty day, and the passengers were crowding 
round the stove fire, to keep themselves warm. Eng- 
lishmen abuse their climate and call it changeable, 
but let them go to the States, and for the first time 
in their lives they would find out what the word 
changeable means; driving a four-wheel waggon 
across a river to-day, and this day week obliged to 
plunge into the same river to cool yourself! Who 
would live in such a country ? And yet this extreme 
of temperature took place on the River Wabash, which 
divides Indiana from Illinois, a little time before I 
was there. 



onio RIVER. 121 

I had determined to avail myself of the first boat 
that should touch at Beaver going down the Ohio, 
but it was late in the afternoon before any arrived. 
One had jiassed whilst Ave were at dinner, and it 
turned out to be a very good one ; so the next, in all 
probability, would be rather inferior. And so, in 
fact, it turned out; it was deep-laden, to within 
four or five inches of the gunwale, and had but few 
passengers, not above thirty, in a saloon fit to 
accommodate a hundred. But this proved rather an 
advantage. The passengers became all very sociable 
together, which could not have been the case had we 
been full ; and as the weather was fine, and our table 
abundant, we did not affect an impatience which we 
did not feel, and saw other boats give us the go-by 
without any regret. The Ohio is just 1,000 miles 
long, from the bridge at Pittsburgh to the junction 
of the River Mississippi, and a finer thousand miles of 
river scenery could hardly be found in the wide 
world. The lower part of the river, however, is 
quite destitute of beauty, it is only the first five or 
six hundred miles that is really picturesque; the 
mountains coming down to the river within a mile or 
two, leaving a rich bottom of alluvium between the 
navigation and the foot of the hill. In other spots 
the mountain comes down to the water, and here we 
see the people busy excavating coal, limestone, or 
iron ore. The price of coal is put up in large letters 
at many of the pits, which varies from three-halfpence 

M 



122 COAL THREE-HALFPENCE A BUSHEL. 

to twopence-halfpenny and threepence per bushel. 
It was three-halfpence at Martinsville, opposite 
Wheeling, and got gradually dearer till we lost it 
altogether. Then we came to the Salt springs, after 
which the minerals ceased for many hundred miles. 
During the whole thousand miles of the River Ohio 
there is no bridge, but numerous ferries, and along 
the banks of the river there are ninety-eight towns or 
villages, of which Cincinnati is the largest, and then 
Louisville; but Steubenville and Wheeling, Ports- 
mouth, Maysville, Covington, Lawrenceburgh, JefFer- 
sonville, Evansville, and New Albany, are all more 
or less flourishing and increasing places. From the 
bridge at Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Piver Mis- 
sissippi, below New Orleans, is 2,212 miles, a naviga- 
tion that is daily performed in a species of boats or 
flats that are merely nailed together like packing- 
cases ; and, as it might be expected, almost daily acci- 
dents are happening to these frail conveyances. 

Our fellow-passengers seemed all to take an interest 
in the English traveller; and were not long in in- 
quiring where he was going to, as is usual amongst 
Americans. This, by the way, is either grown harm- 
less, or does not exist so rudely as many writers have 
represented it ; and as to the often-alleged impro- 
prieties of speech and liberties taken with the Queen's 
English amongst Americans, I need not be suspected 
of partiality to the Pepublicans, when I say, without 
hesitation, that our language is spoken much better 



A surgeon's experience. 123 

and more correctly in all parts of America than it 
is in England. There are no provincialisms in the 
States, where the abominable dialects of Somerset, 
York, and Lancaster, entirely disappear; and, exten- 
sive as the country is, one uniform correctness obtains 
in speaking the English language. 

In answer to their inquiries how far I was going, I 
made free to ask the same question of many, and in- 
deed most, of our passengers. One middle-aged man 
replied that he was a surgeon, going to establish him- 
self at Bolivar, in the State of Missouri ; it was quite 
a new place, and represented to him as very healthy. 
He had formerly lived in Indiana, near Vincennes, 
and had suffered dreadfully in health, and was deter- 
mined to begin again "in a better location? He 
should leave the boat at St Louis, and then take 
another up the Missouri, four hundred miles to 
Independence, where he must buy a horse, and make 
the best of his way through the Osage country, till 
he reached Bolivar, about four hundred miles further, 
the only healthy place, he considered, in the State of 
Missouri. He would have preferred, he said, not to 
have gone so far, and would have liked the capital, 
Jefferson city, but the selection had been so injudi- 
ciously made, that it must always remain an un- 
healthy spot. He pressed me to accompany him, at 
any rate, as far as Independence ; but I could hold 
out 6mall prospects, for, much as I loved adventure, 
my time was limited ; and I wished to sail for Europe 



124 DISASTEES OF EMIGRANTS IN ILLINOIS. 

before the bad weather set in. He wished, he said, 
that he was going with me, for he himself, he added, 
was English, being a native of Hertford, but he 
feared he should never see his native place again. I 

here inquired into the fortunes of the family, 

which emigrated, many years ago, to Illinois; he 
said he had known them well, but it was quite ex- 
tinct — father, sons, and daughters, all dead and for- 
gotten. Should we go ashore at , and inquire 

for the name of , once so influential in those 

parts, he assured me it would not be remembered, or 
even known. The last of the race was compelled to 
seek work in a brickmaker's field, wheeling clay and 
sand to the moulders ; and this fine young man, who, 
had he remained in England, could hardly fail to 
have done well, turned to drinking, and finally finished 

himself by (here he made a significant motion 

across his throat, that could leave no doubt of the 
dreadful end of the last of his race). 

"It is impossible for an English agriculturist to 
succeed in this country," said the surgeon, " whether 
he has capital or not. Without money he would stand 
perhaps a better chance, but either way it is impossi- 
ble." As soon as Mr arrived in this country he 

was sanguine of success ; all his neighbours entered 
into an agreement among each other by every means 
to obtain his ready money ; and though the real price 
of Indian corn was only fivepence per bushel, amongst 
themselves, yet, when Mr became a buyer, as he 



TAKING IN THE BRITISHERS. 125 

must be to a large extent, the price to him was to be 
a dollar, or four shillings, per bushel ; and they all 
religiously adhered to this piece of roguery on every 
occasion to fleece the rich Britisher, who, so far from 
repining at the high price, saw in it the very element 
of success, and wrote home those well-remembered 
letters, and calculations of wealth, by growing thou- 
sands of acres of prairie land with Indian corn at 
eighty bushels per acre, and four shillings per bushel, 
but which, fortunately, deceived nobody but himself ! 
Perhaps no Englishman ever emigrated to America 

with greater advantages than Mr . With a 

large capital and still larger experience as a practical 
farmer, he carried with him his own society of seve- 
ral educated sons and daughters ; and the only mistake 
he seems to have made, and a fatal one it was, was 
not going to Upper Canada instead of to the United 
States. Had the family gone to the English side of 
Lake Erie instead of the American, with such advan- 
tages as they possessed, everything they touched 
would have turned to gold; the sons and daughters 
would have married into the first Canadian families ; 
they would all most likely have been alive at the 
present moment, rich, prosperous, and happy; thei* 
houses and lands would have advanced to a high 
market value ; and the head of the family would have 
been figuring, as he was so well calculated to do, as a 
member of the Canadian Parliament. What a melan- 
choly contrast this sad history presents ! 



126 ROAD TO OREGON. 

I inquired of my medical friend, pointing to the 
roof of our steamboat, where all those four-wheeled 
new waggons were going to, so nicely painted ; some 
forty or fifty waggons with their wheels slung over 
the sides. He answered me that they were made in 
Pittsburg, and were all going to Independence for 
sale to the Oregon settlers or Santa Fe traders, 
who all made the little village of Independence their 
starting-place. This year there was a very con- 
siderable movement in both directions, and it was 
thought to Oregon alone there would be ten thou- 
sand settlers start off in the six weeks beginning 
with the 1st of June, and some even reckoned the 
number at twenty thousand. He told me that on a 
former excursion up the Missouri, he had learnt a 
good deal about the journey, which to an American 
was far from formidable, if undertaken in a proper 
season of the year; and before we parted he furnished 
me with a good many valuable memoranda respecting 
this qucestio vexata — the territory of Oregon, some of 
which I have placed at the end of the volume. 

I said to another younger man, " Where are you 
going to, if you will excuse my curiosity ? " He 
replied, " To Peoria, in Illinois." " Have you ever 
been there?" I asked. "No," he said, but he had 
heard it was a very promising place ; he had come 
from Akron, in the Portage county of Ohio, and was 
an artist. I asked if it would not have been nearer 
to have gone by the lakes ; he said yes, it would, 



TRAIRIE DU CHIEN. 127 

but he wished to accompar^ his brother-in-law as far 
as he was going, who kept a store at Fort Madison, 
and was now on board with his new wife (his sister) 
to whom he begged to introduce me. The bride was 
far from ill-looking — was young and cheerful; and 
the prospect of a residence in the distant State of 
Iowa seemed not to give her a moment's uneasiness ; 
on the contrary, she had heard so much of the health- 
iness of Fort Madison, that she did not at all regret 
leaving her brothers and sisters in Ohio. 

" Are you going also to Iowa," I said, to rather a 
Jew -looking man, who was evidently a tradesman, 
and had considerable anxieties on his brow. " No," 
replied he, " I am going home to my store and family 
at Prairie du Chien." In answer to my questions, 
he said it was a very poor place, no money stirring, 
except the little spent by the Indians out of their 
Government allowance, and now and then a few 
dollars from the United States' troops ; and as it was 
a horrid climate for eight or nine months in the year, 
he had made up his mind to leave it, and was going 
home now for that purpose. " Where do you think 
of removing to?" He said he had hardly yet made 
up his mind completely, but he thought it would be 
Key West, where there was more money stirring, 
and a warmer climate. As Key West is a little low 
island, on the coast of Florida, he will no doubt find 
a considerable change in climate, after coming from 



128 MEMPHIS. 

the almost perpetual winter of Prairie du Chien, on 
the Upper Mississippi. 

The last person that engaged my inquiries was a 
son of the South. He should leave us, he said, at 
Louisville, and then proceed to his home at Mem- 
phis, in the State of Tennessee, on one of the bluffs 
of the Mississippi, and one of the most flourishing 
and promising places in all the West. Memphis 
shipped last year, he stated, eighty thousand bales of 
cotton, and was beating the older towns of Vicks- 
burg and Natchez, lower down the river, all hollow. 
He hoped I should come and visit them at Memphis, 
and I should really be surprised to see how they were 
going a-head with railroads, &c. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

VOYAGE DOWN THE OHIO CONTINUED. 

Co-operative Societies always successful — No Drinking, no Poverty 
— "What are the English Clergy ahout ? — American Temperance 
Pledge — Parallelograms — Rewards for the Poor — Bankrupt 
States— Go-a head Paying States— Cincinnati- Judge M'Lean— 
Louisville— Falls of the Ohio— Complaints of Trade— Evansville 
Blacksmith — Sickly Country — Pogs and Bogs — St Louis — Lead 
and Copper — Iron Mountain — Copper Harbour — Mississippi 
increases Fifteen Miles per Century in Length — Cotton 2jd. 
per lb. 

There is a flourishing community of Harmonites 
on a part of the Ohio, near Beaver, called Economy ; 
and in a day or two we should be approaching an- 
other equally prosperous, known as Rapp's settle- 
ment, at Harmony ; now purchased, I think I un- 
derstood, by Mr Owen. It is a singular thing that 
these communities are all, without exception, pros- 
perous ; not only making money, but, unlike indi- 
vidual farmers, possessing it and keeping it. 

There are the Davidites, to the north of Toronto, 
in Canada ; the Fourrierites, in Massachusetts ; the 
Mormons, at Nauvoo, opposite Fort Madison, on the 



130 CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES. 



and the Shakers, at Lebanon, — cum 
multis aliis,—nnd all doing well. The disciples of the 
Frenchman, Fourrier, are understood to be the best, 
and based on the truest principles of co-operation 
without encouraging idleness, or working the willing 
horse to death. 

In society it is proved, beyond question, that a 
settlement may be made in a new country where 
land is cheap and labour dear, with far better pros- 
pects of success than by private and individual ex- 
ertions. By himself one man becomes almost fright- 
ened at how much he has to do, and how much he 
has to endure ; but in community these difficulties 
vanish. The union and co-operative labour is doubly 
effective in felling trees, raising log buildings, &c. ; 
indeed, it is a continual "bee," to use the country 
phrase, where every one assists the other, whilst all 
the profit of store-keeping, banking, or any other 
legitimate pursuit, goes into the general accumulating 
fund, instead of enriching an individual, and becomes 
public wealth in opposition to private wealth. Ma- 
nufactures, building, and mining succeed to tillage, 
and by good management such societies ultimately 
become the richest in the country. 

If fifty families should agree in London, on this 
principle, and embark for the Gore or London Dis- 
trict, or some of the adjoining districts in Canada 
West, and club their little funds together to pur- 
chase an improved farm, they could not fail of sue- 



NO DRINKING, NO POVERTY. 131 

cess. Of course there must be rules and regulations 
laid down, and a leader appointed to preserve order 
and enforce economy and honesty. Every one must 
sign the agreement, and the creation of wealth after 
the first year or two would be astonishing. 

In general, the communities in America, based on 
the co-operative system, have originated in some 
crotchety nonsense of faith, some peculiarities in 
their religious observances, or in abstaining from 
marriage, and many others ; but notwithstanding any 
nonsense of this kind, they all seem to have had an 
eye to the main chance ; and it is sufficient to notice 
the Shakers and their garden-seeds, which sell uni- 
versally through the United States and even Ca- 
nada at double the price of the same goods from 
private nurserymen. 

The subject of bettering the condition of the poor 
has engaged the minds of thousands of benevolent 
individuals in Great Britain during the present cen- 
tury, whilst millions of money have been freely sub- 
scribed to assist in the good work. But how little 
has been accomplished beyond mere talk, whilst vast 
and disproportionate sums have been squandered in 
useless and expensive tracts, and the salaries of secre- 
taries, collectors, house rent, printing, stationery, 
and advertising. The first step to take would rather 
be something practical, to show the people that one 
mouthful of bread is better for them than a barrel of 



132 WHAT ARE THE CLERGY ABOUT ? 

rum, and one leg of mutton on Sunday is worth a 
whole river of gin ! This would be beginning at the 
right end ; but as the labouring classes will not be- 
lieve this doctrine unless their teachers show them 
the good example, why do the clergy and dissenting 
ministers hesitate to follow in the path of the Ame- 
ricans, and before they preach let them first sign the 
pledge themselves, engaging to abstain from all in- 
toxicating drinks ? Then they might naturally hope 
for success ; thousands would flock to their standard ; 
all trades would improve, except the distilleries : 
because the money expended now in liquid poisons 
would then go in good woollens, shoes, and calico ; 
whilst those wretched scenes, the most disgraceful in 
London, in the neighbourhood of the gin palaces, 
would be spared to the passer-by. 

But nothing will be done till the preachers begin 
it, and the condition of the poor will never be much 
benefited till they adopt the American plan of tem- 
perance. 

How is it that the Rev. Mr This and the Rev. 
Mr That will not sign his name to a temperance 
pledge ? Is it that they are " given to wine," — so 
fond of drink, whether punch or toddy, that they 
cannot give it up ? 

After seeing the wonderful success of the tem- 
perance movement in America, and which has been 
promoted mainly by the dissenting ministers in that 



TEMPERANCE PLEDGE. 133 

country, it is a disgrace to look at home, and see 
these holy and sleek shepherds of the flock incapable 
of abandoning their brandy and water. 

The American pledge is short, intelligible, and 
very much to the point ; * and I cannot help think- 
ing that, if the reverend gentlemen going about 
lately in Southwark electioneering, had employed 
the same zeal in collecting signatures to this pledge, 
amongst the poor and honest inebriates of the Bo- 
rough and the New cut, it would have given them 
far more pleasure and real satisfaction than if their 
candidate had succeeded in his vain attempt. 

This would, indeed, be bettering the condition of 
the poor ; and then would follow other and more 
important plans by which the number of the poor 
would annually decrease. Even parallelograms, that 
have been so much laughed at in England, would 
then probably come into fashion amongst the indus- 
trious classes, who might, by that method, have better 
lodgings at one shilling per week than they can ob- 
tain at present for three shillings, whilst the landlord 
would be receiving 12^ per cent, interest on his 
capital, which is much more than he now obtains. 

In a tliickly-peopled country like Great Britain, 



* American Temperance Pledge. 
" We, the undersigned, do agree, that we will not use intoxicating 
liquors, nor traffic in them as a beverage ; that we will not provide 
them as an article of entertainment, or for persons in our employ- 
ment ; and that in all suitable ways we will discountenance their 
use tliroughout the community." 

N 






134 REWARDS FOR THE POOR. 

where land is scarce and dear, and a large capital 
required for its cultivation, any attempts to press 
the co-operative principle must fail ; but Canada 
West is a country peculiarly adapted to such so- 
cieties, which can no longer be called experiments, 
seeing that so many exist already in that country, 
without a solitary instance of failure. 

The poor in England seem to have had, with all 
the immense amount of the national charities, very 
little done for them. There has been no want of 
prisons and penitentiaries, Bridewells and Newgates, 
gibbets, transportation, and the hulks ; but no legis- 
lators have ever yet proposed rewards for the poor, it 
is and has been all punishment — nothing but punish- 
ment ! We invite them into the gin shops, and 
stand at the doors ready to handcuff them on coming 
out ; forgetting that it is misfortunes that make men 
wicked; and in awarding sentence, make no allow- 
ance for their want of education for their constant 
and superior temptations. Would it not be wiser 
to turn them from the error of their ways by the tem- 
perance pledge, than throwing money away in building 
and enlarging model prisons and criminal courts ? 

But to return to the Ohio. Passing Galiopolis 
and Point Pleasant, we arrived at Portsmouth, at 
the junction of the Grand Canal which connects this 
river with Lake Erie, leading for three hundred and 
thirty-four miles through the heart of the State of 
Ohio. This Ohio canal would be considered an im- 



BANKRUPT STATES. 135 

portant public work in any European country, as it 
has one hundred and fifty-two locks, and cost a mil- 
lion sterling ; but in America these stupendous works 
are common, and undertaken, perhaps, with too little 
thought or calculation. If it were otherwise they 
would not have such an accumulating amount of debt. 
Thus the bankrupt States, or those not paying any 
interest, though not all repudiators, are ten, and 
these are pretty near the amounts following, viz. — 

1. Pennsylvania owes - 41,000,000 dollars. 

2. Louisiana „ - 17,000,000 „ 

3. Maryland „ - - 15,000,000 „ 

4. Illinois „ 15,000,000 „ 

5. Indiana „ - 14,000,000 „ 

6. Alabama „ - - 13,000,000 „ 

7. Mississippi „ - - 8,000,000 „ 

8. Florida „ 5,000,000 „ 

9. Michigan „ - - 4,000,000 „ 
10. Arkansas „ 3,500,000 „ 



Total . 135,500,000 

This is an enormous sum, and never will be paid, 
though from recent efforts on the part of Pennsyl- 
vania, they are making great efforts to pay a divi- 
dend ; and though the largest debt, it is perhaps the 
least desperate of them all, because they have, in the 
Quaker State, great resources and a large population; 
and the friends of Pennsylvania all agree in saying, 
that the interest will be regularly paid in future. 
We shall 6ee. 



136 PAYING STATES, 

In some of the other States the hopes of repayment 
are but feeble. They have commenced everything, 
and finished nothing, and have been long at a stand- 
still, with nothing coming in. " One thing at a time " 
is not the American motto, but everything is sacri- 
ficed for the " Go a-head " principle. So that it is 
difficult to see where the money is to come from to 
pay the interest of any of these debts, except, per- 
haps, Pennsylvania, and it would be a disgrace if the 
second State in the Union in wealth, population, and 
improvements were to repudiate whilst so many infe- 
rior States are regularly paying their dividends. 

Whilst there are ten States which may be called 
bankrupt, seeing they have repudiated and no longer 
pay the dividends, there are, on the other hand, ten 
other States whose stocks are reckoned as very good, 
as they regularly provide for the payment of their 
interest : these are as follows, viz. — 

New York owes - 28,000,000 dollars 

Ohio „ ' - 19,000,000 „ 

Virginia „ - 7,000,000 „ 

Kentucky „ 4,500,000 „ 

Tennessee „'--'■- 3,000,000 „ 

Georgia „ - 2,000,000 „ 

S. Carolina „ - 3,000,000 „ 

Missouri „ - 1,000,000 „ 

Maine „ - 2,000,000 „ 

Massachusetts - - 7,000,000 „ 



Total - - 76,500,000 



CINCINNATI. 137 

"Without reckoning the national debt of America, 
giving a grand total of indebtedness amounting to 
two hundred and twelve millions of dollars, which 
is nearly fifty millions sterling, a tremendous sum, 
which ought not to be increased. 

After passing a bustling little town on the banks 
of the Ohio called Maysville, a few hours brought us 
to Cincinnati, which may be called the metropolis of 
the western country, and containing nearly a hundred 
thousand inhabitants, including the opposite town of 
Covington in Kentucky, to which it is proposed to 
throw over a bridge, which the Americans will find 
no difficulty in doing except in times of flood, when 
the water is sometimes four feet deep in the very 
shops on the quay ! 

Cincinnati is one of the most agreeable cities in the 
Union, and trade seemed flourishing. I counted 
forty-five steamers at the wharf, and most of them 
smoking, ready to shove off on their upward or down- 
ward voyage, all which gave great life and animation 
to the scene. The markets in the city are numerous 
and well supplied, everything cheap and abundant, 
from whisky, at tenpence per gallon, to pork, at a 
penny per pound, and best milk at a penny per quart. 

Indeed, I have heard of a man at one of the mar- 
kets buying, last year, four turkeys, four ducks, and 
four chickens, all for a dollar, or four shillings ! But 
I confess I only heard it; I saw nothing half so 
cheap. This city stands in latitude 39 deg., about 



138 CINCINNATI. 

the same as Lisbon and Alicant, and the winters, 
though very severe, are not quite so long as in Cleve- 
land and New York. The town stands 450 feet 
above the sea at New Orleans, but, notwithstanding 
its great and unparalleled success, it is difficult to say 
what particular cause it is owing to, unless that it is 
a sort of half-way house, in a salubrious climate, and 
the centre of a vast and fertile region, from all parts 
of which it is easily accessible. 

St Louis and Chicago are both getting on fully as 
rapidly as ever Cincinnati did, and promise to become 
as great. The only ham that I ever saw in the States 
that could be pronounced eatable was at Cincinnati ; 
but to look for a rasher of bacon in this paradise of 
pigs would be useless, the Americans do not know 
what it means; they have the name and also the 
thing, but, tell it not in Gath! it is as much like 
London bacon as the filthy American red herrings 
are like our Yarmouth bloaters ! 

Nevertheless, Cincinnati is a very tolerable place, 
and, were I transported to the States, and compelled 
to live there, which God forbid ! 

" And drag at each remove a lengthening chain," 

I think I might hope for fewest annoyances by 
fixing my quarters at the Buckeye city. 

This is, after all, but a faint degree of praise ; but 
it is something to learn that there is a spot in this 
most disagreeable of all disagreeable countries, 



LOUISVILLE. 139 

where an Englishman of spirit and of moderate taste 
and desires could contrive to pass away his time 
without being much insulted. The society of Cin- 
cinnati is good and literate too, which is an extraor- 
dinary thing to say for an American town. I had 
letters of introduction to one of the principal inhabi- 
tants, the Honourable Judge Maclean, but I under- 
stood he had not returned from his judicial business 
in Michigan, and I did not care about any other in- 
troductions. The judge, I learned, w r as a man out of 
ten thousand, full of virtue, intellect, and knowledge ; 
and will probably be put in nomination for the Presi- 
dency in 1848 by the young and feeble party called 
the native Americans, or young America ; but the 
judge is too honest and too good a man to be success- 
ful in such a contest, and he will most likely reap no 
other honour or reward than being rejected, like 
Henry Clay ! 

Our boat stopped all the day at Cincinnati ; and in 
the afternoon she dropped down the river along with 
three others, all large steamers, and bound, with full 
cargoes like ourselves, to St Louis. We had the 
satisfaction of being the slowest of them all, and 
before it was dark were left far astern. 

After passing Lawrenceburgh, the first town of 
Indiana, we arrived, soon after daylight, at the Swiss 
settlement of Vevay, where a doubtful attempt has 
been made to cultivate grapes. Here the River Ohio 
begins to lose some of its beauties ; the high lands 



140 PALLS OF THE OHIO. 

have receded farther from the river, and the place did 
not look a quarter as well as the real Vevay on 
" Leman's Lake," commanding, as it does, the glorious 
view of the everlasting Alps ! 

We stopped some time at Louisville, with its 
numerous tall chimnies, but made little or no altera- 
tion in passengers, except taking one in at New 
Albany, a town four miles lower down ; who made, 
I remember, great complaints of the badness of 
trade, alleging that New Albany had been built too 
close to Louisville, and that all his ready-money 
customers supplied themselves at the larger city. 
He was about leaving it for the west, perhaps for 
St Louis ; though he did not hear very good accounts 
even of that city, for it was reported that great 
scarcity of money prevailed at St Louis, that trade 
of all kinds was dreadfully overdone, and it would 
not be long before a crisis took place there, as the 
storekeepers owed immense sums of money to the 
merchants of Baltimore and Philadelphia, which it 
was impossible they could pay. He was therefore 
going to see if these unfavourable accounts were true 
or not. 

The falls of the Ohio, though considerable enough 
to interrupt navigation after a dry season, were 
nothing at the time we passed, as the river was very 
full ; but the rapids have been rendered harmless by 
an excellent canal, which, though only a mile long, 
has cost a million of dollars. This canal enables the 



EVANSVILLE BLACKSMITH. 141 

largest-class steamers to pass up the river in the 
lowest state of the water, and has tended very much 
to the benefit of Louisville and all the higher parts 
of the river. Louisville contains forty thousand 
inhabitants; and is, next to Cincinnati, the largest 
place on the Ohio. It may be considered the Dun- 
dee of America, as it is more largely engaged in the 
trade and manufacture of hemp than any other town 
of the Union. Pittsburgh is called the Birmingham 
of America ; but such comparisons are far from flat- 
tering to the English, the cleanest part of Pittsburgh, 
as I saw it just after the fire, being far dirtier than 
the lowest districts in Birmingham. 

At Evansville, in Indiana, the last town of any 
consequence on the Ohio, w T e took in a passenger for 
St Louis ; who stated to me that he was a blacksmith, 
and, in answer to my inquiries, was doing pretty well, 
putting by his fifteen or sixteen dollars per week: 
and yet he said he was going to leave it, for he could 
not get paid. He admitted that he could get flour 
and provisions, but though he had been eight years 
at work at the forge, in a country far from healthy, 
he was no better off than Avhen he commenced ; he had 
plenty of money on his books for work done, but on 
the books it would remain, for it was next to im- 
possible to collect it, and he was determined to begin 
the world again somewhere else. He was only going a 
little way with us, and should probably select one of 
the Atlantic cities, where there was at least some 



142 SICKLY COUNTRY. 

money, though the profits might not be so good. 
He was taking Indian corn in at eightpence per 
bushel, and wheat at two shillings, when he could get 
it, and would be well satisfied to close his accounts 
in this manner ; but those articles were the same as 
money, and were not to be had for old debts. He 
was determined to leave the country. We had also 
two young men that joined us at Evansville. They 
were Germans, from Alsace, and were returning to 
Europe shortly, having done no good. One of these 
young Germans had just recovered from a bed of 
sickness, caused by the fever and ague. He had 
been living at Terre Haute, a very pretty town near 
the boundary line, between Indiana and Illinois ; but 
had caught the fever at La Fayette, which was a 
better place for business than Terre Haute, and all 
he had been enabled to save was just sufficient to 
carry him from the wretched Wabash to the banks 
of the Rhine. He told me that he had been in a 
clothing store, but whether as principal or assistant 
there was no means of judging. 

These frequent accounts of want of success were 
almost the invariable results of my inquiries, and 
they were truly disheartening; as these persons, 
though in an humble sphere of life, were samples of 
a large and useful class, and ex uno disce omnes. 

But it was very little better when I made in- 
quiries about our wealthier fellow-passengers ; I say 
about them, for I could not expect them to tell of 



FOGS AND BOGS. 143 

their own extravagancies and embarrassments: but 
it appeared, from good authorities, that the cotton- 
planters of the south were a most reckless race, had 
no regard to the value of money, had their planta- 
tions heavily mortgaged for monies borrowed of the 
abolitionists in Boston to purchase slaves when 
cotton was worth sixpence per pound sterling, and, 
now that it had fallen in the shipping ports to two- 
pence-halfpenny, they naturally felt a constantly in- 
creasing difficulty in paying the interest ; but how 
they should ever pay the principal they neither 
knew nor cared ! 

We were now in the lowest portion of the River 
Ohio ; it was broad, deep, and muddy, with a slug- 
gish stream, and we were looking with interest for 
its junction with its mighty neighbour, the great 
Mississippi. All the beauty of scenery had vanished; 
we were passing the miserable Shawnee town, which 
had been better named Ague town, off the mouths 
of two extensive rivers — the Cumberland and Ten- 
nessee — both coming from the south. 

The River Ohio, which had been so beautiful for 
five hundred or six hundred miles, was now uniting 
with the Mississippi, and seemed to resemble an 
ocean of pea soup — an ocean without a shore — not a 
bit of dry land to be seen as big as your portman- 
teau. Vast and raging, full and overflowing, this 
impetuous mixture of clay and water was now against 
us, and we had to keep our steam up to overcome 



144 ST LOUIS. 

the current. It was altogether dismally uninterest- 
ing ; and there were no regrets at leaving the decks 
for the night; and it was not till dark the following 
evening that we descried the lamps of St Louis. 
But, dark and late as it was, I had my luggage 
landed, and was soon comfortably at supper at the 
Planter's hotel. 

In the morning I discovered that we were in a 
large and rapidly improving place of forty thousand 
inhabitants, that our hotel was a palace, and that 
there was a brisk and important commerce carrying 
on with places up the various neighbouring streams, 

" Eivers unknown to song ;" 

and with cities, whose names even had scarcely, if 
ever, been heard on the European side of the At- 
lantic. Boats at the wharf were getting up their 
steam for Galena and Dubuque, bringing back car- 
goes of lead ; — excursion boats to St Peter's River, 
Lake Pepin, and the falls of St Anthony, touching 
at Prairie du Chien, and not occupying ten days, 
with an excellent table all the way ; — ■ boats for 
Peoria and Peru, up the Illinois River ; — others for 
Jefferson city and Independence, up the Missouri ; 
but the far greater number were placarded about for 
Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, on the Ohio, whilst the 
largest boats were for New Orleans, touching at 
Memphis, Vicksburgh, and Natchez. 

Here was an amount of business truly astounding, 



LEAD AND COPPER. 145 

and I could not help saying to myself, — If there is 
a place in the whole of the American Union that bids 
fair for permanent prosperity it is this, St Louis ! 

The wharf is lined with grog-shops, the temperance 
movement not having had time to travel yet 2,000 
miles from New York, and copper money, singular to 
say, is not in circulation ; like Beau Brummell, they 
" don't know the coin." But St Louis is the head- 
quarters for lead, which sells at 14/. to 15/. per ton, 
even there, and it was to be seen in immense quanti- 
ties whichever direction you might proceed in, but 
principally down by the shipping-place. The lead 
district near St Louis extends over two millions of 
acres, and, with the adjoining States of Iowa and 
Wiskonsin, forms undoubtedly the richest region in 
the world for that mineral, beating the English and 
Spanish mines already in amount of produce, but in 
a few years it will be equal to the whole consumption 
of the globe. It appears that they have not yet 
adopted the method which the great leadowners of 
Yorkshire and Northumberland have of refining the 
lead ; consequently many tons of silver, say seven or 
eight, are thrown away annually by the Americans 
on the banks of the Mississippi, as I reckon every ton 
of their lead will produce five oz. of silver ; and con- 
sequently their loss this year will be near 200,000 
dollars, by not refining. 

Iron is so abundant to the south of St Louis that 
it seems to be on that account quite disregarded. 

o 



146 MISSISSIPPI INCREASES 

At the Pilot Knob and Iron Mountain the ore is so 
rich and metallic that it may be beaten out into some 
rough implements on the spot, whilst at Copper Har- 
bour, in the neighbouring State of Michigan, on the 
shores of Lake Superior, a 'company in Boston has 
secured what they consider the richest copper-mines 
in the world, extending over 250,000 acres. This 
enterprise is quite in its infancy, having been only 
just discovered, but 1,000 tons of ore were shipped 
to Boston at the opening of the navigation in 1845, 
which produced 700 tons of metal ! My informant 
was one of the partners, but assured me there were 
no shares for sale, there never having been more than 
twelve partners. Copper has been hitherto imported 
largely by the United States, but as soon as they get 
their smelting-furnaces erected at Copper Harbour, 
America will be an exporter of copper, as she already 
is of lead. 

This copper business is the most important discovery 
that has been made in that country for yea-o, and 
ought to enrich the otherwise poor State of Michigan. 

Is it not more than likely, that, if competent per- 
sons Avere to be dispatched to Canada, the same 
mineral riches might be found on the British side of 
Lake Superior, opposite Copper Harbour ? At any 
rate it is worth the attempt. British capital would 
not be found wanting for maturing such a speculation, 
and Canada is greatly in want of exports. St Louis, 
though such an important place, is in a very bad 



EACH CENTURY FIFTEEN MILES. 147 

situation, though it was the best that offered to the 
original French settlers. 

The floods of the united rivers, Missouri and Mis- 
sissippi, unite at a spot only eighteen miles above the 
city ; and, by the time this father of waters has 
reached St Louis, it seems about to carry everything 
before it. The channel is already taking an unfortu- 
nate direction for the town, and is roaring over to the 
opposite shore of Illinois, deepening the water where 
it was not wanted, and leaving shoals at St Louis,, 
where they wanted depth of water. The furious 
river during the floods makes itself entirely new 
channels ; and it is not improbable that, some day or 
other, St Louis may no longer be on the banks of the 
river : — 

" The boats are still there, but the waters are gonee' : 

If we see a town on the Rhine that has formerly 
changed sides and back again, there is no difficulty 
in anticipating much greater changes in this fearful 
river, whose ancient channels are at the present day- 
far inland, mere long swamps, in the State of Illinois., 
and which old channels the river seems to be desirous 
of re-opening. 

When we consider further, that, during the last 
two hundred years the mouth of the Mississippi has 
pushed itself thirty miles further into the sea, we can 
understand what changes may be looked for in the 
next two hundred years, and we can also ascertain 



148 COTTON TWOPENCE-HALFPENNY PER POUND. 

what becomes of the millions of tons of earth and soil 
carried down at all periods of the year by this river 
of rivers. It forms the immense alluvium between 
the city of New Orleans and the Belize, on which 
future sugar planters will make their fortunes. 

Sugar planting is a profitable business at New 
Orleans. I was introduced to one living at Patterson- 
ville, near that city, who was making money fast. 
He rather appeared to commiserate the state of the 
cotton-planters, with a constantly falling market, and 
contrasted the 200,000 hogsheads of Muscovado, of 
their last crop, at full prices, with the expensive and 
badly remunerated business of growing cotton at 
twopence-halfpenny per pound. Sugar was, how- 
ever, exposed to the casualty of frost, which was some 
winters so severe in the low wet soil of New Orleans, 
as entirely to cut off the canes, and destroy the hopes 
of the planter. It was also a much more expensive 
crop, but then the produce of an acre of cane brought 
three times as much cash as an acre of cotton. 

But the country was dreadfully sickly, and, as the 
people begin to die off on or about the loth of August 
in the lower part of the Mississippi, nobody can 
remain in the district after July. They must then 
push off somewhere without delay or deliberation, and 
they generally take the steamer for the Ohio or St 
Louis, in order to save their lives. 



CHAPTER IX. 

MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AND SLAVERY. 

Rush of Waters— Funerals — Widows at Fifteen — American Young 
Ladies mere Dolls — Adieu to Fellow-passengers — Steam-boat 
Certificates — Cheap Engineers the dearest — Paying Members of 
Parliament a bad plan — Santa Fe and Oregon — American Spolia- 
tion — Three Million Slaves — If Property in Slaves were abolished 
the Traffic would cease — Free Labour best — Home, sweet Home 
— Monarchy preferable to Democracy — King of Mississippi — 
Probable Changes — Railway through the Desert to secure Oregon 
— Americans should buy our Claim for 5,000,000/. — The other 
Alternative more expensive — American Policy should be Peace 
— Xon -interference — Wheat 16s. per Quarter— En ghsh Corn and 
Cattle Laws bad. 

St Louis, with all its advantages, geographically 
speaking, of position, is in other respects an unfor- 
tunate selection, for it must ever be an unhealthy 
city. There is a terrible mortality every summer 
and autumn, from the murky atmosphere which is at 
those seasons filled with the overloaded miasmata of 
a thousand swamps, near the meeting of the waters 
of these great rivers. People were dying fast, even 
at the early part of the season, when I was there, 
owing to the long-continued inundations from the 



150 FUNERALS. 

Missouri. It is now too late in the day to alter the 
names of these rivers, but what is called the Missouri 
is unquestionably the Mississippi, and ought to have 
been so called, the same character of mud and rate of 
progress proving the two streams to be identical; 
whilst the Upper Mississippi is a clear stream, more 
gentle than the other, and at the junction unites as a 
perfect stranger. Each river is as distinct, to com- 
pare great things with small, as the waters of the 
Soane and Rhone, where they blend together at 
Lyons, and it is a pity that such an important error 
must now be allowed to pass without a hope of cor- 
rection. 

As deaths and funerals are so frequent in all parts 
of America, except perhaps the New England States, 
compared with what they are in Great Britain, the 
same ridiculous vanity is not observable in the last 
marks of respect paid to the deceased. The friends 
assemble in their usual dress, and by a numerous 
muster, rather than by their inky habiliments, testify 
their regard to the memory of the defunct. As for 
hearses and mourning coaches, plumes, cloaks, and 
hatbands, with all the other tricks of undertakers to 
make out a long bill for funeral expenses, all such 
nonsense is unknown in America ; whilst the act of 
sepulture is performed with as much propriety and 
decency as in London, and probably does not cost 
more than a sovereign ! And why should it ? This 
is one of the most glaring follies of my countrymen, 



WIDOWS AT FIFTEEN. 151 

and it is to be hoped their good sense will not much 
longer submit to the tyranny of undertakers. Though 
in America, a funeral attended by fifty friends of the 
family need not cost more than a few dollars for the 
coffin and grave, yet in some parts of Italy, I remem- 
ber, it costs still less, not half as much as it does in 
America, but then the practice is revolting, though 
nobody witnesses it. A large grave is opened every 
day in the year ; and all who die that day are buried 
without coffins, in that grave, principally by torch- 
light. The bodies are then covered over with quick 
lime, and the earth shovelled in, and the same grave 
will not be opened again till that day twelvemonths, 
there being a new and separate grave for each of the 
365 days of the year, which are all treated in the same 
way ; and, by reason of the cprick lime, nothing is 
found to remain in the grave when next it is opened. 
In this way survivors have nothing to pay for funerals 
in Italy, and it is well it is so, for the ostentatious 
plan of the English funerals would soon ruin all Italy. 

I saw, in St Louis, a widow and a mother at 
fifteen, which is at all times a melancholy sight, but 
which could never be seen in England. It is the 
more melancholy in America, inasmuch as it proves 
the greater mortality among the men, which is 
allowed on all hands, and because the American 
ladies are at best but helpless creatures, and more 
especially at that tender age. 

The early marriages of the American girls is 



152 ADIEU TO PASSENGERS. 

always remarkable, and some writer has observed, 
that they no sooner put down their dolls than they 
take up their infants, which is often true ; but they 
may well dispense with dolls, for they are nothing 
but dolls themselves all their lives. They absolutely 
know nothing ; and the father of a family of four 
daughters, and who had often himself been in Eng- 
land as a buyer of Birmingham and Sheffield goods, 
told me that not one of his girls knew anything 
more about making a pudding than George the 
Third did. Indeed, he doubted if either of them 
knew how to lay the cloth for breakfast : but as for 
melting a little butter, or boiling a potato, it was 
as foreign to them as algebra. The reason, he said, 
was plain. Often born, and always reared, as they 
call it, in boarding houses, they never see anything 
of the kitchen — which is in possession of a black 
cook — perhaps, all their lives. There is a good deal 
to impress a stranger with in this distant city of 
St Louis, and the busy wharf was a constant ex- 
cursion. My fellow-passengers down the Ohio were 
here embarking for their various destinations, and all 
gave me the heartiest invitations not to forget them. 
My surgical friend tried hard to persuade me to 
accompany him as far as the town of Independence, 
whilst the open-hearted young bride plied me as hard 
to go with them and see Fort Madison. But it was 
impossible ; I had already come farther than I had 
intended., and I had no sort of inclination to be over- 



STEAM-BOAT CERTIFICATES. 153 

taken by the marsh fever, the remittent or the inter- 
mittent fever, ague, or dumbague, or to be finally 
laid in a wet grave on the banks of the Mississippi '. 
so I wished them all, most sincerely, every good, 
and finally bade them adieu : intending, in my own 
mind, in two or three days to embark also on my 
return to the eastern cities, and prepare for a voyage 
to Europe. The steamers, as I said before, make 
a very formidable show along the wharves at St 
Louis, and explosions are not unfrequent. One fine 
boat — the Big Hatcher — blew up at the wharf soon 
after I left. The various State Governments have 
all passed laws that no steamer shall ply for pas- 
sengers until she has obtained a certificate from two 
competent persons, appointed as inspectors, that she 
is, both as to her hull, engines, and machinery, safe 
and sound, and fully worthy to proceed on the voyage 
she is licensed for. 

This certificate, framed and glazed, may always 
be seen fixed in the most conspicuous part of the 
vessel, and is" calculated to impart great confidence 
to the public. But they say nothing about the en- 
gineer, who ought equally to be licensed, as it can 
be proved that most of the terrible explosions on the 
Mississippi 'have arisen from the carelessness, igno- 
rance, or drunkenness of the engineers, who are very 
often nothing more than common stokers or firemen, 
promoted to the care of the machinery because they 
are willing to receive a dollar or two per week less 



154 PAYING MEMBERS A BAD PLAN. 

wages than their predecessor. I was, therefore, look- 
ing out for a boat something like the one I came in, 
slow and sure, not fancying these " Beat-everything, 
red-hot, high-pressure" concerns, that, after taking 
your money, throw you a somerset into the air, in- 
stead of quietly performing their contract to land 
you in Louisville or Cincinnati. 

I found abundance of oyster shells, live lobsters, 
' Punch ' and ' Mrs Caudle,' in this distant city, 
proving that two thousand miles carriage from New 
York was looked on as nothing, as, indeed, it added 
little or nothing to the price. There are plenty of 
newspapers published daily in the town, but the 
farther west the less talent is observable in the 
editorial department ; and so that new advertise- 
ments pour in, which they do, the papers care little 
for original articles. 

It is no bad thing to be returned as a member of 
Congress from these distant States, such as Missouri, 
of which St Louis is the capital. The mileage al- 
lowed by Government for travelling is sufficiently 
liberal to leave a considerable profit ; and the eight 
dollars daily payment during the session makes the 
allowance fully equal to three or four hundred a 
year sterling : an amount that is sure to tempt some 
needy lawyer, or at any rate some individual, to 
whom such a respectable means of existence is worth 
intriguing for. This plan of paying members is a 
very bad system, although it looks equitable in 



SANTA FE AND OREGON. 155 

theory ; and as it is a favourite project among Eng- 
lish Reformers, like those equally absurd crotchets 
of the ballot and universal suffrage, all I can say is, 
let my % honest fellow-countrymen forbear to imitate 
any of these three schemes, because they are Ame- 
rican. If they would only go and judge for them- 
selves how these fine theories work in practice, they 
would be disgusted with them, as I was, and return 
to their fatherland contented with being citizens of 
the best governed country in the world, and the only 
land of true and genuine liberty ! 

I could not help watching the removal of our 
nicely-painted blue waggons, from the steamer that 
brought them from Pittsburgh, to the boat that was 
ready to start for Independence. There was, evi- 
dently, a considerable trade going on with the Mex- 
ican province of Santa Fe and the northern parts of 
Texas, the annexation of which appeared to confirm 
all true Americans in the overwhelming power and 
preponderance of American diplomacy. 

Though Santa Fe forms no part of Texas, it will 
be no difficulty to the Shannons and Calhouns at 
Washington to include it, and thus open up the 
entire road to St Francsico and Monterey, in Upper 
California ; for although Oregon may be a very good 
country, and, as they say, always has been, and always 
shall be, part and parcel of the United States, in spite 
of Great Britain, still Upper California is a much 
better one, and the United States will never stop 



156 AMERICAN SPOLIATION. 

till she obtains possession of it for her increasing and 
adventurous citizens. Such is the unqualified lan- 
guage of all parties of the people, but whether such 
be the sentiments of Mr Polk and his Cabinet at head 
quarters this deponent sayeth not. 

The Americans say they were obliged to annex 
Texas in self-defence, and it was solely to prevent its 
becoming a free country that it was admitted to the 
Union of freemen. Had it remained a free and in- 
dependent State, it would have been impossible to 
prevent the half-murdered slaves in Arkansas, Loui- 
siana, Mississippi, and Alabama from running away 
across the frontier ; and Texas would have become 
the same sort of nuisance as the British settlements 
in Canada, only a great deal worse, as being so much 
nearer to the slave population. But the Americans 
may depend upon it, whatever injustice is committed 
in this aggression on the territories of a friendly and 
neighbouring power, they shall have their reward. 
The robbery of Mexico will not be followed by that 
easy and quiet course which the Government of 
Washington expect ; for it is a law of nature, certain 
and invariable, and which God speaks as plainly 
through his works as if we heard it uttered in his 
voice from Heaven, that no individual, party, or 
people can act unjustly with safety any more than I 
could go to sleep across the Birmingham railway, or 
attempt to fast thirty days. Look at the French at 
Tahiti and Algiers ; the English at AfFghanistan and 



THREE MILLION SLAVES. 157 

New Zealand ; and the Russians in Circassia and the 
Caucasus, how they have all reaped that they have 
sown ! So will it be in Texas and California. Every 
act of American fraud and injustice will be visited by 
a proportionate punishment of disgrace and suffering. 

Look at the gross and infamous injustice of this 
free people, as they call themselves, keeping three 
millions of their felloAV-creatures in the condition of 
slaves ! And not satisfied with all the evils, losses, mur- 
murs, and murders of the system, they are still open- 
ing up fresh ground in Texas for the increase and 
further development of this hellish degradation ! To 
buy the slaves is out of the question, they are too 
numerous, and the purchase of them would amount 
to one hundred millions sterling, at the least. There 
is no other remedy but to make a virtue of necessity, 
and by freely giving them their liberty, and hiring 
them afterwards as domestic or farm labourers, put 
an end to this horrible reproach. Even if it pro- 
duced a national bankruptcy or crisis, as it assuredly 
would, it would be the least of two pressing evils, 
but far preferable to that impending and threatening- 
day when a servile war may take place, and another 
St Domingo business be repeated in the cotton States 
of America, on a much larger scale 1 

There is some hope that the fine State of Ken- 
tucky Avill be the first to show an example in this 
good work. But whichever may be the first of the 



158 PKOPERTY ABOLISHED, TRAFFIC CEASES. 

States in this holy race, it will be twice blessed in 
giving and receiving; and nothing but honour and 
prosperity would attend it. 

Until the Christian world consents to abolish 
slavery, it will be impossible to stop the slave trade. 
Till we agree to put an end to the practice of one 
man holding a property in his fellow-creatures, it is 
useless to attempt to abolish the traffic in our fellow- 
creatures. And, melancholy to say, the present 
flourishing state of the slave trade on the east and 
west coast of Africa amply proves this. For the 
cause of humanity has gained but little by the British 
act of abolition of the trade or traffic in human flesh, 
merely because we began at the wrong end, and did 
not stipulate by treaty for doing away with the pro- 
perty in human flesh ! When the slave trade was 
legal, the numbers of negroes annually shipped from 
the coast of Africa amounted, on an average, to 
50,000, out of which the deaths on the voyage did 
not exceed five per cent., say 2,500 human carcases 
thrown overboard as food for the sharks ; but now, in 
the year 1845, with a large preventive service on the 
coast, kept up at an enormous waste of English lives 
and English treasure, the numbers shipped reach 
150,000, whilst the mortality has increased to fifteen 
per cent., or twenty-two thousand Jive hundred dead 
bodies thrown overboard every year ! A good 
deal the unfortunate results of English diplomacy, 



FREE LABOUR BEST. 159 

beginning originally at the wrong end; trying to 
crush the traffic before they crushed the property in 
blacks. 

There is no doubt that white men cannot grow 
sugar and rice, and very few of them would stand 
either cotton or tobacco ; negroes, therefore, must be 
had for all these four branches of agricultural indus- 
try ; and why not ? It was never intended that our 
black fellow-creatures should escape the general law 
of tilling the ground for the support of life ; indeed 
the state of labour, as previously remarked, is the 
very condition of enjoyment; and, as some French 
writer calls it with still more enthusiasm, labour is 
the " divine physician of our bodies and souls." But 
let us hire our black friends, and treat them as we do 
the whites, and pay them their stipulated wages, and 
in the picking season of cotton and the boiling season 
of sugar, if they demand an increase of pay, let us 
give it, in the same manner as we pay higher wages 
at harvest time in England. 

It is no use to object that if freedom were granted 
to the slaves they would leave the estates, and, roving 
about the country, commit robberies and murders. 
Experience has proved in Jamaica quite the contrary ; 
besides, if they did, a more vigilant police would soon 
interfere with this habit. It may also be said that 
the slaves are already happy, often singing, better 
fed than your English labourers, and that the accounts 



160 HOME, SWEET HOME ! 

of cruelty and ill-treatment by the overseers are false 
or notoriously exaggerated. Be it so. I have heard 
a slave myself singing " Home, sweet home ! " 
of all songs in the language the least adapted to his 
condition. But this only shows how easy the black 
race adapt themselves to their degraded and infamous 
position, brought on entirely through the wickedness 
and greediness of their owners. As soon as the price 
of cotton shall fall in these Southern States one cent 
per pound more, and, instead of four cents and a 
half, it should be sold at New Orleans and Mobile 
at three cents and a half, or, at Liverpool, if it 
should fall to twopence halfpenny per pound for 
ordinary New Orleans, the slavery system of the 
United States may be considered virtually at an end. 
In like manner, if the Minister in England should 
give up the corn laws, down would come the market 
value of rice ; so that, if no alteration should be made 
in the tobacco duties, then the planters would find 
out that free labour would be much cheaper than 
slave, and in fact, with the low price of cotton, rice, 
and tobacco, they would be compelled to alter their 
whole system. The price of sugar is of no conse- 
quence. 

Missouri, though a slaveholding State, does not 
reckon more than 60,000 of them, and it is thought 
she already regrets that she ever elected to be admitted 
to the Union in such a character, particularly as the 



MONARCHY PREFERABLE TO DEMOCRACY. 161 

country is cold, and not adapted to the cultivation of 
those four crops where black labour may be consi- 
dered indispensable, such as we have just referred to. 
It is a very large State, containing forty-six millions 
of acres, and therefore not very much smaller than 
the whole of Great Britain, and yet, large as it is, it 
forms only one out of thirty various States or inde- 
pendent Governments, which have united together, 
from time to time, in a sort of league, by which, while 
they agree to conduct their own internal affairs, they 
are united together for their common interests, 
with a general Government common to them all, 
and having their relation to other Governments in 
common. 

By this sort of compact they all hoped to avoid the 
evils of the too great extent of kingdoms, the neglect 
of remote provinces, and the usual mismanagement 
of local affairs, the constant jobbing and corruption 
incident thereto, whilst they might enjoy all the 
advantages of concentration, as well as the conve- 
niences and privileges of many capital cities, instead 
of one. These are, no doubt, solid advantages, and, 
if there were no drawbacks, would be the perfection 
of human government. But it has been found out 
in America, during the sixty years' experiment of 
their independence, that there are two great, alarm- 
ing, and daily increasing evils incident to this sys- 
tem : — 



162 KING OF MISSISSIPPI. 

First, the too great independence of the separate 
States; witness the nullification lately in South 
Carolina; and secondly, the want of power in the 
general Government to perform its functions. 

This is more and more striking every day with the 
good folks at Washington, who feel the incapability 
of ruling where there is no obedience in the go- 
verned. And as every year increases the power of 
the separate States, so, as there is no natural increase 
in the functions of the central Government, the one 
gets weaker as the other gets stronger ; and when 
Cincinnati or St Louis demands the transfer of the 
seat of government, and it is not complied with, then 
look out for squalls. The Western States have no 
particular affection for thiDgs at Washington, and to 
be King of Mississippi may be the aim, some future 
day, of some successful adventurer, just as " King of 
Alleghania " may awaken the ambition, one of these 
days, of some millionnaire in the Empire State of 
New York. The American Union is, no doubt, like 
its great river lying beneath me, grand and imposing, 
and its energies and resources vast and wonderful; 
but there is no certainty or permanency in either ; 
the river is yearly making itself new channels, ravag- 
ing the neighbouring lands, and is too impetuous for 
human control, — so is the people ; and the seven wise 
men of the East forming the Government will find 
the difficulty of their position yearly increasing. 



PROBABLE CHANGES. 163 

A modern writer of great distinction* has said 
that the tendency of human affairs is for the people 
to elect their chief magistrate, acknowledging, at the 
same time, that all elected monarchs have been the 
best ; for instance, William the Third, Cromwell, 
Xapuleon, and Louis Philippe ; but I would say also 
to this philosopher as I would to the English Radical, 
" Go and see," and no true lover of his country would 
wish to see the fixed order of succession, as estab- 
lished in England, ever altered, as the advantages on 
our side decidedly outweigh the many evils of the 
elective principle. 

Since the abolition of the property qualification of 
electors through all the States, Virginia excepted, 
mob law has become " suprema lex ; " and every 
moderate and respectable citizen in America acknow- 
ledges and laments the fatal mistake that was then 
made ; for Jack is as good as his master, and as there 
are infinitely more labourers than bosses, the entire 
power now is in the hands of the rabble ! 

Previous to my arrival at St Louis it was esti- 
mated that as many as 7,000 persons had started for 
Independence and Oregon, at which latter place they 
would arrive about the beginning of November, 1845, 
after a world of troubles and privations. The jour- 
ney may be considered as follows : — 

• Lord Brougham. 



164 RAILROAD THROUGH THE DESERT TO OREGON. 



New York to Cincinnati - 


- 1060 miles. 


Louisville - 


- 130 „ 


Shawneetown 


- 270 „ 


St Louis - 


- 290 „ 



Total from New York to St Louis 1750 „ 

Independence - 420 „ 

Foot of Rocky Mountains - 800 „ 

Fort Hall on the River Saptin 415 „ 

To Vancouver - - 700 „ 

To Mouth of Oregon - - 100 „ 

Grand Total from New York ") a-\qz 
to the Pacific J 

And yet there are two rival schemes to carry a rail- 
road across this country ! Twenty thousand men 
are to be placed on the work, who will complete 
500 miles per annum. Like the ultima ratio regum, the 
railway of the republicans is to settle the question of 
the Oregon, without the trouble of negotiation ; and, 
as it is estimated at a mere trifle, only 5,000/. sterling 
per mile, a single line, it can be accomplished for 
about 20,000,000/. sterling, say, in round figures, 
100,000,000 of dollars, to be raised by a nation that 
cannot pay their debts, or even the interest, and 
among whom it is difficult to see a silver dollar in 
circulation ! And Oregon, when you arrive there, is 
not worth having ! It is a country of mountain and 



AMERICANS SHOULD BUY OUR CLAIM. 165 

flood, and though twice the extent of Texas, com- 
prising about 400,000,000 of acres, it is not capable 
of maintaining more than 1,000,000 of inhabitants ; 
nothing but mountains, torrents, and barrens; the 
best lands in the sea-district being subject to floods 
and regular periodical inundations. 

Though in the latitude of Bordeaux, the climate 
is cold and cheerless, and the river which has given 
its name to the country, for all purposes of commerce 
and navigation, is nearly useless. The water-power 
is certainly unrivalled and unlimited, and there is no 
end to the supply of fine timber ; but beyond this 
one opening which the country offers, of a flourishing 
lumber trade, always a poor trade, there is nothing 
else to induce settlers to emigrate, except, perhaps, 
the salmon business; which, however, nobody likes 
when salted, and it brings in every market but a very 
meagre price ; whilst, for all the purposes of practical 
or national occupation, it is as near to Great Britain 
as to the United States, and most likely will never 
belong to either ! It will be gradually settled by 
the ignorance and rapacity of American emigrants ; 
and, if they don't remove to Bodega and the country 
round St Francisco, Montorey, Santa Barbara, St 
Gabriel, St Diego, and the other missionary stations 
of the Spaniards in Upper California, Oregon will 
become a separate republic, quite distinct from the 
United States. But most likely the Americans 
themselves will abandon it for the richer land and 



166 THE OTHER ALTERNATIVE 

milder climate of California, and I have no doubt, 
under the pretence of starting for Oregon, the whole 
concern is nothing short of a descent on that remote 
portion of Mexico, which the weakness of that Govern- 
ment will not be able to oppose. So that, some fine 
morning, the Mexican authorities will discover a 
great part of Upper California wrested from them, 
and in the actual occupation of American settlers ; 
from the island of Geronimo, about latitude 30 deg., 
to the harbour of Bodega in 38 deg. 

But worthless and remote as Oregon is to Great 
Britain, England has a clear right to it by first dis- 
covery, and she is not going to sit still and see it 
pillaged from her by these unprincipled people ; 
who, if they set so high a value on it, had better buy 
it. It must be cheap at threepence per acre ; so let 
the Government at Washington pay us at that rate, 
which would amount to 5,000,000/., sterling, and so 
settle the dispute. 

If they should decline any negotiations on this 
basis, and expect to get it cheaper by a forcible 
seizure, and the alternative of war, they may in that 
case lose the country and the money too; beside 
having to pay our expenses as well as their own. 
No peace without first paying the bill, being the 
modern mode of concluding hostilities. 

But with all their gasconade, the United States 
Government are hardly mad enough yet to venture 
on a war with Great Britain. True, that country is 



MORE EXPENSIVE. 167 

to a great extent invulnerable nearly, to any attack 
by sea or land ; and though it might be possible for 
a large force to march through the country and be 
well supplied as to quarters and provisions, yet, in 
the end, such a step would terminate in defeat and 
disgrace, and England would lament to see repeated 
the humiliating affair of New Orleans ! Destroy 
New York, Boston, and Detroit, if you please, but 
don't land, further than at the last place, merely to 
give these brawlers for war a practical experience of 
what it means, and what such a rich and powerful 
nation can do to annoy them. If one hundred large 
transports were scuttled and sunk a little below St 
Felippe, at the mouth of the Mississippi, laden with 
stones, and some other one or two plans adopted which 
at present shall be kept in reserve, all the inconve- 
niences of war would be felt by the Americans with- 
out the English losing a single man. The Americans 
don't read Greek, but what Themistocles said a long 
while ago, is truer now than it was then, that " the 
masters of the sea are masters of everything," and 
the glorious Republic would soon find this out. 

The Americans expect that in any future war with 
Great Britain the Black West India regiments would 
be landed at Mobile or some other parts of the slave 
States, and that, by fraternizing and arming the 
slaves, they would rise against their masters and 
liberate themselves from a state of thraldom. Nor 
would such a measure be very difficult in those 



168 NON-INTERFERENCE. 

States where the Black population already exceeds 
the White in numbers, such as Florida, Louisiana, 
Mississippi, and South Carolina; and where it is 
nearly equal, as in Alabama and the southern districts 
of North Carolina. 

War, of all pursuits, should be the last to be thought 
of by America, whose aim for the next hundred years 
should be the creation and accumulation of capital, 
the article they most require, and to concoct the least 
objectionable method of giving early freedom to their 
slaves. The party of abolitionists do more harm than 
good, and have positively retarded the good work 
rather than advanced it ; whilst the indiscreet zeal of 
such friends as Cassius Clay actually swamp the 
humane wishes of many well-disposed Kentuckians 
who could better dispense with their slaves than any 
other State, and who therefore might be expected to 
take the lead in emancipation. 

It is like the war in the River Plate between the 
Gaucho Rosas and Montevideo. Had the English 
and French Governments not interfered, the dispute 
would have been settled years ago ; but Dictators 
do not like to be dictated to ; and as to an armed 
interference on the part of the European Govern- 
ments, it would be equally useless; for how could 
they injure a beggarly country like Buenos Ayres, 
where, we ought to remember, we only came off 
second best once before. Non-interference ought 
always to be the English policy, and it is time we 



WHEAT SIXTEEN SHILLINGS A QUARTER. 169 

learned the wisdom of not meddling in other nations' 
quarrels. We have had experience enough to avoid it. 

Before leaving the immense valley of the Missis- 
sippi, where the cheapness and abundance of bread 
and meat is truly astonishing, one cannot help casting 
a thought across the Atlantic, to that dear island of 
Great Britain, where the people are so much in want 
of both, but who, through mistaken views of policy, 
have passed laws to exclude them. 

I inquired how it was possible for the farmers to 
sell their wheat at two shillings per bushel, and their 
maize, rye, barley, and oats, at eightpence ? " Why, 

sir, my friend , in Indiana, has got this year 

2,000 acres of wheat in one patch, which, at twenty- 
five bushels to the acre, amounts to 50,000 bushels. 
The thrashing by our simple machines, and the cra- 
dling at harvest-time, enables him to get through the 
work much quicker than is done in Europe, and in 
this poor country 25,000 dollars is a large sum to 
receive in a heap for his crop of wheat ; and as car- 
riage is nothing on our rivers, or next to nothing, 
there are few deductions. There is always sufficient 
solar heat to insure good crops, the only danger being 
from drought, but there has never been a failure since 
I have been in the country. Now you see how we 
can grow wheat to pay us at two shillings per bushel, 
or, as you say in England, sixteen shillings per 
quarter, and it is never likely to be dearer ! " 

The entire removal of the duty on bread-corn, im- 

Q 



170 ENGLISH CORN AND CATTLE LAWS BAD. 

ported in British ships, leaving the manufactured 
articles of flour, biscuit, &c, as they stand, or at a 
fixed duty, would be better than going to war re- 
specting Oregon, and filling up the channel of the 
great river between the Belize and St Felippe, and 
would induce the American Government to lower their 
duties on some staple articles of British manufacture. 
The articles of beef and pork are not of so much 
consequence. Englishmen have a very natural re- 
pugnance for salted meat ; and therefore, although the 
entire duty were removed from those articles, they 
would not enter very largely into the consumption of 
the English people ; but surely the expenses and 
risk of shipping live cattle, freight, fodder, water, 
and attendance during the voyage, are sufficiently 
heavy to protect the English graziers ; and the twenty- 
shilling duty on foreign oxen ought to be repealed, 
and the duty on foreign butter and cheese reduced 
one-half. A tariff, according to Mr Polk, to be just 
and equitable, should have no reference to any sec- 
tional interests, but merely look to revenue ; and if 
the English Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot 
afford to forego these various items, let him make 
good the loss by laying an additional shilling duty on 
malt, and raise the annual licence for first-class gin- 
palaces to 50/., and for the second-classes, 30/.; which 
is the exact tax of our Australian colonies. To 
transfer the tax from bread to poison, ought to dis- 
please nobody. 



CHAPTER X. 

RETURN TO THE COAST, MANUFACTURES, ARMY 
AND NAVY. 

Crowded Boats —Frightful Climate — Neither Iowa nor Wiskonsin 
recommended — Philadelphia Poor Place— Folly of High Tariffs 
— Poor Manufactures — Yellow Fever — Boots and Shoes — 
Wooden Clocks — Paper Mills— Soap — City of Brotherly Love the 
most disturbed in the Union— Constant Assassinations — Ha- 
zardous Risks — Fire Insurance — Army and Navy — Fifty For- 
midable Ships — No Grog — Flowers of Rhetoric — New Post-Office 
Law. 

St Louis was now getting hot and unhealthy, and I 
thought it time to be off before it got worse. The 
most I could do, to vary my route homewards, was to 
land on the south side of the Ohio, and so proceed by 
the stage route through Kentucky and Tennessee to 
Washington and Baltimore ; but many circumstances 
tended to prevent putting more than part of this plan 
into execution, and I therefore found myself again in 
Cincinnati, after a crowded and uncomfortable pass- 
age up the Ohio. Though every one is a water- 
drinker, the water in these boats in general is into- 
lerably bad and muddy, it being merely taken up in 



172 NEITHER IOWA NOR WISKONSIN 

a bucket from alongside, and allowed to settle, when 
the mud is precipitated to the bottom of the jar or 
cistern ; but as the impure element was in constant 
demand from such an unusual number of passengers, 
the cisterns were emptied before the mud had time to 
settle, and the water all the voyage was yellow and 
revolting. I thought that one or two hundred large 
earthen filters, such as are seen in London, where 
they are not required, if shipped to New Orleans, 
would have found ready buyers up the river. 

We were now leaving the great valley of the Mis- 
sissippi, which must have been at no distant period 
entirely submerged by the sea ; but the waters 
having retired, they have left for the use of man the 
widest and most fertile valley in the world, containing 
700,000,000 of acres, mostly of good land ! The 
progress of population is the only element wanted 
to insure its greatness; and that is fast developing 
itself, notwithstanding its frightful climate and burn- 
ing marshes. But still, not even climate will prevent, 
though it may impede, the rapid rise of the Western 
States; and it is impossible to imagine that, when 
they shall have gained strength and wealth, they will 
regard Washington city with any other sentiments than 
contempt. What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba ? 
They will govern themselves, and regulate also their 
intercourse with foreign nations, without the assist- 
ance of the gentlemen at head-quarters. This I look 
upon as certain ; and Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, as 



TO BE RECOMMENDED. 173 

they will be the best populated of the "Western States, 
so they will be the first to feel their strength. 

Iowa may be considered one of the best climates 
of all the States ; high and dry> and better drained 
than those lower down, it cannot fail of being a great 
wheat country, and will be the favourite resort of 
settlers for years to come ; whilst the State of Wis- 
konsin, on the opposite bank of the great river, is too 
cold a climate to make any extraordinary progress 
by immigration. It is much more severe than 
Canada West ; which is a country in every respect 
superior to "Wiskonsin. I am the more inclined to 
mention this, as I have observed in a Sunday paper, 
circulating very largely among the working classes of 
London, frequent encomiums on the State of Wis- 
konsin, which the editor strongly recommends as a 
field for English emigrants ! This is to be regretted, 
as it could not fail to lead to disappointment ; and if 
the editor had talked for hours, as I did, with the 
disappointed settler from Prairie du Chien, one of 
the best parts of Wiskonsin, he would in future not 
be so sanguine. 

The Alleghany Railroad is an extraordinary work 
of engineering skill, and does the Quaker State great 
credit. It is only thirty-seven miles in extent, but 
is carried over the mountains, by means of stationary 
engines, to the summit of 2,400 feet, and then joins 
the canal again, leading from Pittsburg to Philadel- 
phia, and 400 miles long. Where the canal could be 



174 PHILADELPHIA POOR PLACE. 

carried no further, by reason of the mountain range 
intervening, the projectors had recourse to a short 
railway ; and, by means of a succession of inclines, 
they have overcome one of the most formidable diffi- 
culties that ever presented itself in railway enterprise. 
After this Alleghany line, civil engineers need not 
be frightened at anything ; for it would be no more 
difficult to carry a line from Basle to Milan than over 
the Alleghanies to Hollidaysburgh. 

We finally arrived at Philadelphia, and felt com- 
fortably settled at Saunderson's Hotel. This city is a 
large and imposing place ; but, apparently, in a sort of 
transition-state from commerce to manufactures. 
There are very few large ships in the foreign trade ; 
not half a dozen, and the Cape May pilots may well 
complain of the falling off of trade; and, drunken 
dogs as they are, keep their spirits up by pouring 
spirits down. The abundance of good coals at Phil- 
adelphia, and all through this extensive State, points 
the city out as the future seat of important manufac- 
tures ; and, with cheap food and cheap fuel, the 
Americans, without any protecting tariff, ought to 
undersell the world. With a five-pound white loaf 
for sixpence, and a roasting-piece of beef for three- 
pence per pound, they need not be afraid of Man- 
chester or Leeds. All they have to do is to aim at 
making better goods. The American printed cottons, 
after returning from Canada, where they are so 
beautiful, looked dull and dingy, as if they had been 



FOLLY OF niGH TARIFFS. 175 

exposed in a shop-window the whole summer months : 
the cloth is good enough, perhaps stronger than our 
own, but the management and mixture of the colours 
is abominable. So much for protection ! 

The Americans will never be a wool-growing 
people ; that is, not sufficiently so for their domestic 
wants. The climate is not congenial to sheep, and 
they are an expensive stock where the winters are so 
long and severe as they are in all sections of the 
Union, compelling the farmers to build costly sheds, 
and lay up large provision of hay and other food for 
seven months' artificial keep. 

And yet an American writer, Avho published a 
volume in 1825, stated in his book that, in twenty 
years from that time (viz. 1845), the export of sheep's 
wool from the United States would be so extensive, 
as nearly to rival that of cotton ! Whereas the ex- 
port of sheep's wool is, now that we have arrived at 
the limit of his twenty years, just nothing ! 

This is exactly an example of the perpetual future 
tense of this boasting people. It is always, " We 
shall or will be." Thus they prophesy that, in 1920, 
only seventy- five years to come, the population of 
the States, now barely 20,000,000, including 3,000,000 
of blacks, will amount then to 160,000,000 ! Entirely 
overlooking the probability that the Union will be 
dissolved or undermined in half that time, and that 
without any wars or external interference of other 
States, but entirely by themselves ! 



176 POOR MANUFACTURES. 

Their woollen manufactures are therefore still 
more inferior than their cotton fabrics ; and yet the 
Government are unfeeling enough to lay on a fright- 
ful duty, in this free country too, and make the poor 
people who stand so much in need of woollen clothing, 
to go without it, or pay an enormous price for it, 
when they could get the fine woollens from France 
and Saxony, and the heavier cloths from Yorkshire, 
at half the money they are now paying. The same 
with carpets. The country is overrun with old jaun- 
diced-looking patterns of home manufacture, half 
hemp, when they could procure the best Brussels at 
the same money, but for their too fond Government, 
who, under the imbecile John Tyler, insisted upon 
stuffing manufactures down the people's throats, 
whether they would or no, although the agricultural, 
mining, shipping, commercial, trading, and profes- 
sional interests amount to 5,000,000 of persons 
actually employed, whilst the whole of the persons 
employed in manufactures was about 200,000 ! By 
which it appears that 5,000,000 of persons and their 
families employed as farmers, &c, are to put their 
hands in their pockets every year to contribute to 
making the fortunes of the 200,000 persons and their 
families employed in manufactures. 

In articles of wood the Americans decidedly excel ; 
all such manufactures being elegant and cheap, and 
want no protection. Their turners' shops, as we 
should call them, being perfect museums in their way. 



YELLOW FEVER. 177 

You see in the eastern cities, buckets, washing-tubs, 
churns, and chairs, by millions, and cargoes of them 
are sent all over the world. They are mostly made 
in New England, during their dreary winters, when 
the ice of the rivers is often as thick as our parlours 
are high, and the snow, by continual drifting, makes 
it a difficult job to get in or out of your own house ! 
And yet the Americans are so thoroughly ignorant 
of other countries, that they are not sensible of their 
living in a bad climate, much less in the worst cliinate 
of the world, — that is, as I said before, of the tem- 
perate zone. 

I know that my friends in America will find fault 
with thus speaking of their climate ; but I will defy 
them all to point out a spot throughout the Union, 
where the thermometer has a smaller range or varia- 
tion than 100 deg. in the course of six months; unless 
it be a place notoriously subject to yellow fever. 
Now can anybody call such a climate good ? Is it 
not execrable ? 

Englishmen complain of their climate, which is far 
preferable to that of the States ; but in England how 
rarely does the variation of the thermometer for any 
six months exceed 50 deg., or just half of the Ameri- 
can. We think it excessively cold in January, when 
the glass stands at 24 deg., or eight degrees below 
freezing; and we reckon it uncomfortably hot in 
July, when the cpjicksilver indicates 74 deg. in the 
shade. But what Avould a Londoner say to 12 deg. 



178 BOOTS AND SHOES. 

below zero in February, and, five months after, viz. 
in July, find the thermometer at Boston up to 103 
deg., making an extreme variation of 115 deg.? 

But in Falmouth and Torquay, Jersey, St Malo, 
or Nice, the variation very little exceeds 40 deg. all 
through the year; 45 or 48 deg. being the extreme. 
Such may therefore be called good climates. In 
Indiana and Illinois a variation of 74 deg. is often 
observed between sunrise and noon ! 

Shoes are an immense article of American manu- 
facture ; and in the State of Massachusetts the value of 
boots and shoes sold every year exceeds 3,000,0007. 
sterling. Of course every one in the States buys 
his highlows ready made ; the combination of eastern 
shoe-factories on so large a scale putting private 
snobs out of the question. They could not get bread 
and cheese ; and are only to be seen, and that rarely, 
in the chief cities of the coast, such as New York 
and Philadelphia. 

Clock-making is also a great trade ; very showy 
mahogany and brass clocks being retailed all over the 
country at twelve and as high as sixteen shillings 
each, bringing in vast sums to the makers. One 
man lately purchased 10,000 of them at a reduced 
price, in New England, at something like 9s. 6d. 
each, shipped them in a vessel just going to China, 
and jumped in himself as passenger ; and having made 
a good sale of his adventure at about 30s. each to 
Fouqui, he came back again in less than twelve 



PAPER. 179 

months a man of fortune, acquired in a single specu- 
lation ! Such is American enterprise. 

Paper-mills are seen and advertised all over the 
country ; the consumption of every description of this 
article is prodigious, not only for newspapers, which 
are twenty times as numerous as ours, but for all 
sorts of wrappers; whilst for children's books, and 
cheap editions of English works, the consumption is 
liberal and increasing. The market-women, and the 
sellers of fruit and cakes at the corners of the streets, 
may be seen with a ream of yellow straw paper at 
their elbow, and with a halfpenny-worth of cherries 
they give you, unasked, a sheet of paper to carry 
them home in. Paper, indeed, seems to be worth 
nothing ; at least the inferior straw paper, which is 
in general use for common purposes. The better 
descriptions are dear, and not much in demand ; but 
of the inferior sorts it is quite the reverse. A child 
is sent to school, for instance, on Monday morning 
with a new spelling-book, a penny Dilworth; and 
before Thursday, what with the heat of the child's 
hands and the dogs'-ears in the flimsy cotton paper, 
nothing legible is left of the penny pedant, and a 
fresh spelling-book is provided for the young urchin, 
who, whatever he may learn, contrives to destroy two 
books a week; whereas, had they been printed on 
good paper, like the English books, they would have 
lasted a month. 

Soap and tobacco are both great articles of manu- 



180 SOAP. 

facture ; and are shipped by these adventurers to all 
parts of the world ; and as tallow, alkali, rosin, and 
water, are abundant enough in all parts of the east 
coast, the soap is very cheap, and, as might be ex- 
pected, very bad. I have seen soap marked up at 
one penny a pound ; and, as rosin is only two shillings 
per cwt., the manufacturers of soap throw in as much 
as possible in order to reduce the price ; but still, tens 
of thousands of boxes of soap are shipped every 
month from New York, bad as it is, and it is most 
likely a good trade, or it would not be continued. 

Philadelphia looks well on the map, but it is really 
far inferior to New York in point of situation. They 
are both low, but New York is entirely free from 
swamps, whilst the drab-coloured city is surrounded 
with wet and overflowed land, so as to render the 
place piercingly cold for eight months in the year, 
and full of sickness and mosquitoes during the 
summer. I saw very little to admire in Philadel- 
phia except the markets and a few of the public 
buildings, and it is not to be compared with New 
York in wealth or commercial importance. How 
a man of correct taste like Joseph Buonaparte, 
the ex-King of Spain, could be content to remain in 
such a country and such a neighbourhood, it is diffi- 
cult to understand ; except that all Europe was shut 
to him, and Count Survilliers, therefore, preferred 
even Bordentown to the surveillance of the secret 
police of Paris ! 



THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE. 181 

Iron castings are very well made in America, 
though not equal to the French, who, to the surprise 
of an Englishman, are very superior to us in this 
department of the hardware trade. 

Although the Quaker city enjoys but a bad repu- 
tation for honesty, she is eminently famous for Irish 
rows, which seem to recur every six or twelve 
months. They are not, however, the simple rows 
engaged in at Donnybrook, where Paddy meets his 
friend, " and for love knocks him down," but they are 
very serious affairs, Paris emeutes, where bloodshed 
and butchery goes on, and houses are set fire to 
without remorse, when they are occupied by the 
enemy. Numbers of these burnings occur without 
being suspected in the neighbouring cities, and the 
military are called out, and as often beaten. How is 
it that this city of brotherly love should be the most 
disturbed district of the Union ? 

The thermometer stood at 90 deg. every day during 
my stay at Philadelphia ; but, though hot, it did not 
interfere with perambulating the spacious streets of 
the city. Walking slowly, and choosing the shady 
side of the street, I usually returned to the hotel but 
slightly fatigued. 

I left this city without regret, just as I had left 
every place in the country, hoping that no possible 
chance in my future life might bring me near them 
again. 

The Americans are truly a vulgar, ignorant, brag- 

R 



182 CONSTANT ASSASSINATIONS. . 

ging, spitting, melancholy, sickly people. Passing 
their lives in a high state of mental excitement, 
some kill themselves with drink, and some with 
tobacco ; some are hurried to the ever-yawning gates 
of their cemeteries by excesses in religion, or excesses 
in politics ; excesses in commerce, or excesses in spe- 
culations ; or tribulations of mind induced by a com- 
bination of these causes. But calamity is not of very 
long life in America, for the men are soon dead, and 
soon forgotten. Duels and assassinations also help to 
thin their ranks; for, strange as it may appear, it 
can be proved that, famous as Italy, Sicily, and 
Spain are for the stiletto, there are many more 
assassinations and stabbings in the slave States of 
America, than in all those countries put together. 
This is a melancholy truth ; but, as the minds of the 
masters in the Southern States insensibly become 
degraded by the mere contact, not to say association, 
with beings so degraded as their slaves, the moral sense 
becomes blunted, they care little for assassination or 
for murder, and nothing for stabbing and maiming. 

The country between Philadelphia and New York 
is a dead level, often in parts covered with water, 
and the railroad is comparatively good, and under- 
stood to pay well, as a pecuniary speculation. 

It was quite agreeable to get back to New York, 
and find one's self surrounded by forests of tall ships. 
I took a stroll through the black ruins of the late fire 
in Broad street, where so many millions had been 



HAZARDOUS RISKS. 183 

destroyed, and could not help thinking that, while in 
London it is 180 years since the great fire of 1666, 
in New York two equally great fires have occurred 
in the space of eight or nine years ; and, no doubt, 
will be frequently occurring again, — at least, as long as 
doubly and trebly hazardous trades are allowed to be 
carried on, often in wooden buildings in the closest 
parts of the town. What would an English insur- 
ance office charge for the following risk ? Four- 
story brick building, without party walls, and roof of 
wooden tiles or shingles ; basement or cellar occu- 
pied by a box and packing-case maker, all the year 
round up to his knees in deal shavings, and working 
every evening by the light of a candle ; ground 
floor, a marine store and ship chandler, full of rope 
and oakum, pitch, tar, rosin, paint, and turpentine ; 
first floor, a lard-oil manufacturer, and maker of 
stearine for the candle works ; second floor, a Luci- 
fer-match and blacking manufactory ; and fourth 
floor, a printer's ? Such an assemblage of trades 
would not be tolerated in any English city ; but it is 
quite au regie in the city of New York. It is not to 
be wondered at, therefore, that the insurance busi- 
ness is one of the most peculiar in America, and 
could only be supported by a liberal and periodical 
smash amongst them, particularly after any great fire. 
Notices are therefore posted outside the doors of the 
chief insurance offices after a fire of any magnitude, 
that " the losses by the late calamitous fire will 
not occasion any suspension of business in this 



184 FIRE INSURANCE. 

office ;" whilst those offices that cannot affix such a 
notice outside their doors are supposed not to be 
able to pay. They make, therefore, a compromise, 
break up the concern, and begin again with a new- 
name. 

As the Americans are for ever talking about war, 
and how they mean to lick the British whenever the 
opportunity is given them, it was interesting to in- 
quire into the strength of their military force, which, 
in round numbers, may be reckoned at 10,000 
effective men, including cavalry, artillery, ordnance, 
waggon, and store department. This force, with a 
trifling exception, is employed in Florida and the 
frontier States nearest Texas, Fort Gibson, Fort 
Learmouth, &c. &c, to overawe the Indians, and give 
protection to the Santa Fe and Oregon travellers; 
whilst a few may be seen at Detroit, and other 
stations on the Canada frontier. It is not a favourite 
service; and, though I often saw the recruiting 
offices and the money inducements printed and pla- 
carded about the towns of the interior for volunteers, 
there is great difficulty in procuring even Irishmen to 
enter, because all classes of labourers in America 
can do better than being shot at for one shilling 
a day. 

The navy is a better service, more comfortable and 
better paid ; and not like the military, stuck up for 
years in distant garrisons, looking after Indians. 
The total number of sailors in the United States' 
navy is 6,100, of whom about 960 are stated to be 



FIFTY FORMIDABLE SHIPS. 185 

native-born Americans, the rest being principally 
English, with a few Swedes and Hanseatics. Their 
pay is fifteen dollars a month, and two dollars per 
month additional, if they don't draw any grog ration. 
This is fully equal to three pounds ten shillings per 
month. Without this high rate of wages it would be 
next to impossible for the Secretary of the Navy to 
man the ships. 

The navy of the United States is very respectable. 
Taking their navy list it appears that they have, of 
all classes of ships, old, rotten, on the stocks, and on 
their rivers and lakes, in China and the Pacific, a 
grand total of seventy-six ; namely, ten line-of-battle 
ships, twelve frigates of the first class, two of the 
second class, twenty-three sloops-of-war, eight brigs, 
eight schooners, eight steamers, together with four 
store-ships and brigs ; but it may be safely reckoned 
that between forty and fifty of this list are really 
superior, formidable vessels, and immediately avail- 
able for any service or emergency. Five ships of the 
line, alongside of which, they say, our ' Victory ' 
looks like a frigate, might be ready for sea in a 
month, and about six first-class frigates, rated as 
forty-fours, but really more resembling our razee, 
e Warspite,' which may be considered one of the best 
ships of her class. The Americans have only one 
razee, the ( Independence,' fifty-four, a description of 
ship that hitherto has not been seen in any of our 
navy yards, but which we shall soon have to exhibit 



186 NO GROG. 

in a few razees now constructing out of some old 
first-rates that have not seen much service. About 
twenty sloops, or small frigates, might also be made 
immediately available, provided they could find hands, 
and nothing but the high wages of seventy shillings 
sterling per month to the temperance sailors, and the 
late act abolishing flogging, could enable them to man 
their ships. It has been proved, over and over again, 
that the seamen are far more efficient and healthy, as 
well as in better discipline, without grog than with it ; 
and a drink of hot cocoa or coffee, when they reef 
topsails, is more agreeable to the hardy sailor than 
the stimulus of grog in the British navy. 

Note. — An American writer of the present day thus lays down 
the difference which he understands to exist between his countrymen 
and the English : — 

"By the American institutions every citizen is in himself a sove- 
reign ; and possesses, as a matter of course, every natural right 
and its consequences that monarchs grant by special act of grace 
to their obedient subjects. While Europeans range in varying 
subordinate degrees, the citizens of our glorious republic have a 
right to rank with kings." 

In a. mad prospectus for a railroad, only 4,000 miles long, to 
Oregon, the projector finishes with the following specimen of the 
grand : — 

" Arouse, then, Americans, and obey the mandate which destiny 
has imposed upon you, for the redemption of a world ! Send forth 
upon its mighty errand the spirit of enfranchised man, the spirit of 
liberty and philanthropy, to the uttermost ends of the earth, in a 
fulness that shall realize the fondest dreams of the millennium ; 
nor let it pause until it bears down every barrier of unrighteous 
power, till it enlarges the boundaries of freedom to the last meri- 
dian, and spreads its influence from pole to pole." 



NEW POST-OFFICE LAW. 187 

The new post-office law had come into operation 
since July, 1845, and it was expected on all hands to 
turn out a failure. The rate is now twopence-half- 
penny on a single letter, or half oz., for any distance 
not exceeding three hundred miles, and fivepence for 
all above that distance. The stamp is a head of 
Washington, that any apprentice might engrave after 
a few months' teaching, and the consequence will be 
a universal system of forgery ; whilst newspapers are 
forwarded thirty miles for nothing, and private indi- 
viduals in towns and cities are allowed to put up 
boxes and convey letters by their own private penny 
post, to the great damage of the public revenue. So 
that the poor post-office law has not a fair chance of 
success, from nothing more than want of proper 
organization. There are between fourteen and fifteen 
thousand postmasters to be paid also out of this 
revenue ; so that, when Congress meets, it may be 
fairly expected to be announced a total failure ! 



CHAPTER XL 

EDUCATION, RELIGION, NATIONAL BANK. 

Education — Learned Professors— National Bank impossible for 
Want of Honest Men— The Voluntary Principle — Freehold Pews 
■ — Chapel Speculations — Religious Sects Harmless — Church 
turned into Post Office— His Excellency the Rev. Mr Everett, 
late Minister at St James's — Mr M'Lean — Mr Marcy — Public 
Lotteries— Provision for the Poor— Americans have no Music 
in their Souls — Two Drunken Bishops — Conclusion. 

There is a general diffusion of common education 
all through America ; reading, writing, and the first 
rules of Cocker being indispensable in the poorest 
communities ; but beyond this there is very little to 
talk about. There are no instances of men eminent 
in learning or science ; everything is for utilitarianism ; 
and Latin and Greek are not in demand. The best- 
informed professors are in the New England States, 
where they manage to keep up the appearance of a 
decent love of learning ; but it is mostly subservient 
to theological studies, and preparatory to joining the 
ministry. 



LEARNED PROFESSIONS. 189 

Notwithstanding all this lack of knowledge, there 
are between one hundred and two hundred universities 
and colleges in the United States ; and 100,000 per- 
sons living upon the public, engaged in what they 
call the learned professions ! There are no surgeons 
or apothecaries in America, any more than there are 
captains or lieutenants ; they are all majors and colo- 
nels, and, of course, doctors. No person would be 
insane enough to affix his name on the door as plain 
Mr Liston, surgeon, but invariably Doctor So-and- 
So ; because, if he did, he could never earn a guinea, 
and must abandon practice, however great his abili- 
ties. So that all America is one continual and living 
falsehood ; just as they say that the United States 
Bank is built of white marble, when it is notorious 
that there is not a quarry of white marble in the 
whole country. They have a white limestone in 
Vermont that works well for gravestones, doorsteps, 
&c, but it is not capable of polish in the slightest 
degree, and has as little claim to be called marble as 
alabaster. 

This too celebrated Bank of the United States 
just referred to, as many aching hearts in London 
know, is situate in Philadelphia; and is really a 
handsome building of white stone, now converted 
into a Custom-house. The great buildings in Wall 
street, New York, do not pretend to be of marble, 
but of simple granite ; and they are not of that frau- 
dulent and fictitious character that the Philadelphian 



190 NATIONAL BANK IMPOSSIBLE. 

establishment rejoiced in. The question of a National 
Bank has been often discussed, and there seems no 
good reason why there should not be one, seeing 
what splendid, useful, and profitable concerns those of 
France and England are; but no, every one was 
against it, but especially the late President Jackson, 
who did all in his power, most indecently so, to ruin 
every plan for such an institution. They pretended 
to be afraid of raising up a monied monster, ready at 
any time to ruin their free and democratic system ; 
they feared also that this gigantic power would render 
itself too powerful in elections for President, &c. ; 
but, above all, as was most frequently alleged, there 
were not honest men enough in the United States to 
be entrusted with its management, and they should 
be obliged to send to England for all the officers and 
clerks, from the governor downwards to the porters 
and messengers ! "What an admission ! Something 
like the confession of a merchant, who had realized a 
large fortune, and lived not a hundred miles from 
Fayette place, and who had occasionally a dinner 
party in the English style, though the family gene- 
rally lived in the front kitchen, or basement story 
under ground; but, in order to prevent his guests 
cutting and slashing his mahogany, as soon as the 
dessert was set on the table, there was always placed 
with the apples a dish of little sticks of soft deal, for 
the gentlemen to cut instead of the table, which they 
assuredly would have done, pour passer le temps, if 



VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE. 191 

they had not been provided with the handier and 
softer material ! 

This sitting still at table after having done eat- 
ing is insupportable to an American, who is entirely 
unfurnished with anything like table-talk, and fancies 
the best dinner in the world need not occupy more 
than seven or eight minutes ! 

With regard to religion in America, the Govern- 
ment affords it no support whatever, it being left 
entirely to the voluntary zeal of its professors, who 
are reckoned at about 50,000 persons, or about double 
the number in Great Britain. The churches and 
chapels are still more numerous in proportion than 
the pastors, often averaging one place of worship in 
each town for every three hundred inhabitants ! 
But in a country where selling the fee simple in a pew 
is better understood than it is in England, church- 
building is often a first-rate speculation, and the most 
taking advertisements concerning it may be often 
read in their leading journals. The country, there- 
fore, what between powerful preachers and cunning- 
builders, is overrun with churches, and it is not easy 
to predict where this popular movement is to stop. 
But there are anti-renters in religion as in all other 
American callings, and who prefer the open fields 
and the summer evenings for their camp meetings 
and revivals. Of these obscene assemblies it is super- 
fluous to speak, except to say that they are not a bit 
worse than the sacrament Sundays in many country 



192 EELIGIOUS SECTS HARMLESS. 

places in Scotland, especially the Black Isle in In- 
verness-shire and thereabouts, where I have been 
present. 

Notwithstanding this jumble of religious trading 
and the title deeds of pews, there are some respect- 
able congregations in every section of the Union, 
whilst those assuming to be the most respectable 
for intelligence and wealth are the Episcopalians 
and Unitarians. What would be considered in Eng- 
land the most deistical doctrines are there propounded 
and defended before the most select congregations, 
whilst the bolder and newer views of the Transcen- 
dentalists are pronounced to be the opinions and 
creed of those who promise to become the gifted men 
of the day. 

All the thousand religious vagaries in America 
seem to produce no harm, but rather good. The 
cultivation of the religious sentiment being the gene- 
ral taste of the people, runs, no doubt, frequently 
into lamentable excesses and follies, but they seldom 
have any tendency to disturb public order, and being 
split into so many hundreds of shades and sections, 
in the end all balance one another, and rather promote 
the ends of civil government. The cost of religion 
in the United States per annum may be reckoned at 
about 10,000,000/. sterling, or 10s. annually out of 
the pockets of every individual in the country. This 
is without reckoning the cost or interest of money 
in their numerous churches, but merely includes the 



NEW YORK CHUECn, PRESENT POST OFFICE. 193 

stipends of the ministers, the wages of doorkeepers, 
fuel, light, printing, and travelling expenses. This 
is an immense sum, and contrasts very unfavourably, 
with all its faults, with the ecclesiastical establishment 
of England. But, bad as our system is, it is better 
than the voluntary one ; for as a circulation of one- 
pound notes is sure to drive away the gold, so does 
the excess of these " little goes," in the way of chapels, 
swamp and finally destroy the respectable church. 
Though a free trader in everything but religion, I 
hope never to see the day when to be a preacher it shall 
not be necessary to be a gentleman. If that should 
ever be the case in England, farewell peace and do- 
mestic comfort, and welcome shipwreck of everything 
that is great or good ! 

The central Government, not long ago, seeing the 
increased business of the post office, were looking out 
for a more suitable locality ; and having the offer of 
a church in the most public part of the city of New 
York, negotiations were opened, and it was finally 
purchased ; and the building, with very little exterior 
alteration, makes a most convenient, cheap, and suit- 
able public establishment. Other churches have from 
time to time been devoted to secular uses in New 
York and other cities, nor is it at all uncommon for 
a person brought up to the ministry to turn round 
on the first advantageous offer, and relinquish his 
gown and sacred calling. The late plenipotentiary 
at the Court of St James was an instance ; his 



194 ONCE A MINISTER ALWAYS A MINISTER. 

Excellency Mr Everett having in early life been a 
preacher in the Unitarian connexion ; but a good 
opening presenting itself, leading to the diplomatic line, 
he naturally accepted it. His successor, the present 
Envoy Extraordinary, Mr M'Lean, is understood to 
have taken the appointment for only two years. The 
situation was going a-begging ; for though the most 
difficult of the foreign stations, it is the most expen- 
sive of courts, and only paid at the same rate as the 
minister at Brazil — viz., 9,000 dollars per annum ; but 
as the allowance for outfit is the same whether the 
appointment be for one year or ten, Mr M'Lean was 
appointed, on his own terms, for two years, making 
the actual salary 13,500 dollars per annum, instead of 
only 9,000 ! The envoy is known as a thorough 
republican, and will, no doubt, do all in his power to 
maintain the honour and interests of his country; 
and my Lord Aberdeen must take care, on the other 
hand, in any negotiations on the vexed question of 
Oregon, that the plain republican, who goes on foot 
to Downing street, does not get to windward of him. 
Mr M'Lean was chairman of one of the southern 
railroads previous to his appointment as minister to 
Great Britain, and was held by the shareholders and 
his brother directors in the highest estimation for his 
business and personal qualifications, and he will no 
doubt be very glad to lay down the great man, and, 
at the end of two years, return to Baltimore. I had 
been introduced on board a steam-boat to an elderly 



MR MARCT. 195 

looking person, leaning on a gingham umbrella, 
amongst the crowd of passengers, one of the Cabinet 
Ministers at Washington, — no less a person than the 
Secretary of State, as he would be called in England, 
for the War Department ; or, in plainer language, 
Win, Marcy, Secretary at War. He was a plain sort 
of person, and, as might be judged from his conversa- 
tion, a very peaceable secretary, looking apparently 
with more interest to his salary of 1,500/. a-year, his 
routine duties and red tape, than to any schemes of 
conquest or ambition. 

It will hardly be supposed that public lotteries can 
be tolerated by the States' Governments at this ad- 
vanced age of religion and civilization ; but, lament- 
able to say, they abound ad nauseam in many of the 
States; for, though New York has kicked out the 
nuisance with contempt, and made it penal for any 
person to deal in lottery tickets, yet they are to be 
purchased in various public places of the city as 
easily as cigars, and the first thing that strikes the eye 
of the stranger when he crosses the Ferry from New 
York to New Jersey is a large board Avith " State 
Lottery Office " written up ; and a capital business it 
appears to be, though every one is ruined at it except 
the owners and contractors. The trade in lotteries, 
like the slave trade, was bad enough when it was 
legalized, but as soon as it was abolished by law, 
and recourse was had to smuggling, the nuisance 
became more bold and revolting, as well as constantly 



196 PROVISION FOR THE POOR. 

increasing in magnitude and profit. I was told of 
several young men, originally of respectability, now 
reduced almost to beggary in New York from in- 
dulging in lottery -tickets. 

It is quite an error to suppose that there are no 
poor in this land of liberty without law ; they are as 
numerous as they are in other cities, but they are 
taken out of the streets, and therefore do not force 
themselves so prominently on public attention. In- 
deed, the American plan in the management of peni- 
tentiaries and poor-houses, is better, perhaps, than 
ours. The inmates being abundantly fed, but dread- 
fully worked, and their labour being sold by tender 
to the highest bidder, the contractor has a direct 
interest in turning their labour to the best account. 
There is therefore no fear of these receptacles of vice 
being made too comfortable. 

I have elsewhere remarked that the Americans are 
a dull and gloomy people ; they never sing except in 
chapel. This is by no means a result of their tempe- 
rance, because they are undoubtedly gayer in the 
present day than they were in the good old times of 
Stoughton and dram-drinking, now happily gone 
by for ever. But still there is no disposition to be 
merry, nor would an Italian boy be able to collect a 
copper in the streets of an American city, even were 
he a Paganini in disguise. What ! no street-music ? 
No, it is not the taste of the people. In their utilita- 
rian notions they will not allow themselves to be 



DRUNKEN BISHOPS. 197 

happy, although it has been long acknowledged that 
" to be happy is to be good." 

There was a good deal of gossip about the pecca- 
dilloes of the two bishops lately degraded, Bishop 

Onderdunk and Bishop . It turned out that 

they were both fond of a glass of port wine, and 
thought it gave them strength and confidence in 
addressing large assemblies. But the congregations 
were not at all of this opinion ; for, though it might 
be necessary, in the rev. prelates' opinion, to go 
charged into the pulpit with intoxicating drinks, if 
they could not address the Supreme Being without 
such impurities, the sooner they abandoned their high 
calling the better : and the consequence was that 
the two Fathers in God were dismissed forthwith, 
and very different men have been elected in their 
place. 

CONCLUSION. 

The most agreeable incident during my sojourn in 
America was tjie preparation for leaving it ; and it 
was with no small degree of pleasure that after se- 
curing an excellent cabin in the fine American liner, 

, Capt , we saw Sandy Hook astern of us. 

We had but few passengers, and all English or Cana- 
dians ; and after a rapid and agreeable passage, 
landed in Old England in time for partridge-shooting. 



CHAPTER XII. 

A GENERAL VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES UP TO 

1845. 

New England States : Maine— New Hampshire — Vermont — 
Massachusetts— Rhode Island— Connecticut. Middle States : 
New York— New Jersey — Pennsylvania— Delaware. Southern 
States: Maryland — District of Columbia — Virginia — North 
Carolina— South Carolina — Georgia — Florida— Alabama —Mis- 
sissippi—Louisiana. Western States : Ohio— Kentucky — Ten- 
nessee — Michigan — Indiana — Illinois — Missouri— Arkansas- 
Wisconsin — Iowa — Texas. 

For the sake of such of my readers as are not very 
familiar with the statistics of the United States, I 
have thrown the following sort of recapitulation to- 
gether, which will give them a very good idea of the 
state of the country at the period of the writer's visit. 
The United States may be considered the most 
interesting and important division of the New World. 
The popular nature of its Government, the rapid in- 
crease of its population, the temperance, industry, 
and enterprise of its inhabitants, together with their 
Anglo-Saxon language and origin — all conspire to 
make Englishmen regard the country with particular 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 199 

favour, especially as it is, no doubt, the most produc- 
tive portion of the Xorth American continent. 

After Great Britain, the Americans are the most 
commercial nation of the world, and their country 
enjoys a large proportion of land eminently fitted 
for cultivation, whilst there are but few mountains, 
few barrens, no extensive deserts, immense prairies 
of good soil without a tree, and the richest vallies in 
the world. 

The mountains are few, and of no serious extent in 
elevation; the highest, which is in East Tennessee, 
only rising to 6,000 feet. The lakes are numerous 
and large, and may be reckoned as interior seas of 
fresh water. These last are shared with Canada, 
except Lake Michigan, which is entirely within the 
American boundary. Michigan Lake is 320 miles 
long, and though a cold, gloomy, and flat country, 
without a hill to be found on either shore, it is 
rapidly j settling by emigrants from the Eastern 
States. 

The principal rivers in America are the Mississippi, 
4,100 miles long, watering a valley of not less than 
700,000,000 of acres, of surpassing fertility 1 The 
Missouri, formed by the Yellow Stone, the Platte, 
and Kansas, is another mighty river ; whilst the Ar- 
kansas, 2,000 miles long, Ked River, 1,500 miles, 
Ohio, 1,000, and Illinois, 500 miles, come next in 
importance to the Mississippi and Missouri. The 
mines of America are very considerable, and, though 



200 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

only in their infancy, the produce of lead is already 
20,000 tons per annum. The United States is a 
federal republic. Each State is entirely independent, 
and has control of all its local affairs ; whilst the defence 
of the country, the regulations of commerce, the 
coinage, &c, are intrusted to the general Govern- 
ment, which consists of a President, elected for four 
years, a Senate formed by fifty- eight senators, being 
two from each State, and at present 250 representa- 
tives, elected by the various States, according to their 
population, which is regulated by law as follows : — 
One representative to every 47,700 of freemen, and 
one to every 79,500 of slaves. The President must 
be a native-born American, thirty-five years of age, 
and have resided in the country fourteen years. 

The American constitution secures personal free- 
dom, liberty of conscience in matters of religion, the 
liberty of the press, trial by jury, and the right of 
choosing, and being chosen, to office. 

The revenue is derived principally from a duty on 
imports, the sales of land, the post office, and lead 
mines. 

The navy consists of about sixty ships of war ; of 
which number about thirty, or one-half, are formida- 
ble ; they have seven navy yards, viz., at Portsmouth, 
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Nor- 
folk, and Pensacola ; and there are upwards of 14,000 
post offices throughout the country. 

The Eastern States are famous for grazing and 



UNITED STATES IX 1845. 201 

their dairy produce, the Middle and Western States 
for wheat and Indian corn, and the Southern States 
for cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. The crop of 
cotton for this year, 1845, will, it i§ thought, exceed 
2,500,000 bales; 100,000 hogsheads of tobacco; 
and 250,000 hogsheads of sugar. There are 1,000 
steam-boats traversing their waters, and they reckon 
upwards of 3,000 steam-engines in various parts of 
the country. Their manufactures exceed in value 
300,000,000 of dollars annually, but of this large 
quantity they do not export more than to the value 
of 7,000,000, which principally consist of coarse 
calicoes, tobacco, and sperm candles, clocks, and 
coopers' work. 

The property-qualification for electors has been 
abolished, within these few years, in all the States 
except New Jersey and Virginia. There is a general 
diffusion of common education ; but none are found 
eminent in literature or science, though they boast of 
100 universities. No provision is made for the sup- 
port of religion, which is left to the voluntary prin- 
ciple. In forty or forty-five years, the population is 
expected to amount to 100,000,000. The churches 
and ministers are about one in every 500 inhabitants. 
There are still about 300,000 of the aborigines, or 
Indians ; two-thirds of which are beyond the Missis- 
sippi, and one-third on the eastern side of that river. 



202 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

New England States. 

There are six States so called, viz., Maine, New- 
Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, 
and Connecticut. They are all of an unmixed English 
origin ; they are looked upon as the model States of 
the union, being religious, moral, industrious, com- 
mercial, literary, and enterprising. Their country is, 
however, mountainous, rocky, and barren, whilst the 
falls of water being universal, have led the inhabi- 
tants to manufacturing industry, and a long line of 
coast has diverted a great many to the fisheries. The 
winter evenings are employed by the farmers and 
their families in little manufactures, where the raw 
material is of small value ; but though trifling in 
detail, are important in the aggregate. Education 
is universal in these States ; indeed, it would be diffi- 
cult to find an adult person without common school 
learning. Still the population is but small, only 
two millions and a half, as the inhabitants are con- 
stantly emigrating to the Western States. There 
are a few sheep raised in this country, but it is gene- 
rally too cold for them, whilst in Pensylvania they 
can muster as many as two millions. 

1. Maine 

Contains 35,000 square miles ; is cold and mountain- 
ous. It joins the British Colony of New Brunswick, 
and by the wisdom of the Ashburton treaty was 



UNITED STATES IN 184o. 203 

pacified from a previous state of high excitement 
on the Eastern Boundary question, now so happily 
settled. In consequence of the British improve- 
ments going on along the line, and a grand Govern- 
ment road at the expense of England, no future 
doubts can ever arise on this former cause of dif- 
ference between the two countries. The principal 
trade of Maine consists of lumber, which amounts to 
two millions sterling annually. The towns are mostly 
in the southern portion of the State. The population 
is only scanty. Portland is the chief town. 

2. New Hampshire 

Contains 9,5000 square miles ; is very mountainous 
and barren. Population not increasing, as they are 
given to emigration. Portsmouth, the capital, is 
thought to contain 7,000 inhabitants. 

3. Vermont 

Contains 8,000 square miles; is entirely an interior 
State, not connected with the ocean, but is nearer to 
Lower Canada and the city of Montreal than any 
other of these parts. A good deal of cattle is fed 
on the hills in summer. Quarries of a beautiful white 
stone are worked, which they call marble ; like the 
Highlands of Scotland, the people are excessively poor, 
whilst their numbers are not increasing:. 



204 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

4. Massachusetts 

Extends over 7,000 square miles, and is the best 
cultivated country of the whole American Union, 
and may be considered one of the richest and most 
industrious. The boots and shoes manufactured in 
this State amount yearly to the large sum of four 
millions sterling. Population, 700,000. Boston is 
the principal city, and the fifth, in point of population, 
in the United States. Harvard University, in the 
town of Cambridge, is the most respectable scho- 
lastic establishment of these parts. Nantucket and 
New Bedford are great seats of the South- Sea whale 
fishery, and Lowell, Lynn, and Marblehead are all 
celebrated for their manufactures. The Legislature of 
this State refuse to grant any licences for the sale of 
spirituous liquors by retail. 

5. Rhode Island 

Is a very small state, not containing more than 1,225 
square miles, with a population of 108,000. Provi- 
dence and Newport are the principal towns ; the latter 
is considered one of the best harbours of America. 

6. Connecticut 

Contains 4,764 square miles, and 300,000 inhabi- 
tants. Is celebrated for the Blue Laws, a code of 
great severity against persons not going to church, 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 205 

&c. Sunday in this State commences at sun-set of 
Saturday, and finishes at the same time on the follow- 
ing evening. The valley of the Connecticut River 
is one of the prettiest pieces of scenery in America ; 
and extends for upwards of one hundred miles through 
the finest meadows in New England. Yale College, 
at Xew Haven, was founded by Governor Yale, when 
Connecticut was an English colony, and is one of 
the most important seats of learning in the United 
States. 

The four middle states consist of 

1. New York, 

The first and most important of all the United States ; 
extending over a space of 47,000 square miles, and 
boasting a population of three millions, having trebled 
itself in twenty years. 

The city of New York is, next to London, the most 
commercial city in the world ; and there are also se- 
veral other important and flourishing cities, as Albany, 
Utiea, Syracuse, Troy, Oswego, Rochester, and Buffa- 
lo, all deeply engaged in agriculture and manufactures. 

2. New Jersey, 

A small State of only 8,320 square miles, low, sand}', 
and marshy by the sea-side ; but, nevertheless, un- 
usally prosperous from an active manufacture and agri- 
cultural industry ; whilst, being placed between the 
two great markets of Philadelphia and New York, 

T 






206 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

and in a cheap and abundant country, with the falls 
of the Passaick and Patterson, it enjoys many advan- 
tages over rival manufactories ... in those great cities. 
— The population is not far short of 400,000. 

3. Pennsylvania. 

This is a large and important State, about the same 
extent as New York, comprising 46,000 square miles. 
It is a fine and fertile country, boasting a rich soil 
and a milder climate than New York, and abounds 
in minerals and manufactures. The coal-fields, called 
anthracite, extend over 624,000 acres ; whilst at the 
west side of the Alleghany mountains there is an 
equal abundance of bituminous coal. 

On the pretty river Kiskiminetas millions of bush- 
els of salt are annually made from the brine-pits in 
Western Pennsylvania, where every fifty-five gallons of 
water is said to produce a bushel of salt. The country 
is intersected in all directions by canals and railways ; 
and, though the income of the State is only one mil- 
lion of dollars and their debt is forty millions, there is 
every reason to anticipate, more from the resources of 
the country and good policy of the governors than 
their honesty, that in a short time the dividends will 
be punctually paid, and the people gradually regain 
their now lost character. A private individual, a 
banker, named Gerard, has been a great benefactor to 
the State by bequeathing lately two millions of dollars 
to found a college for destitute orphans ; which promises 



UNITED STATES IX 1845. 207 

to be, when complete, one of the handsomest buildings 
in Philadelphia. The population of the State is 
nearly two millions. The city is well laid out, be- 
tween two fine rivers, the Delaware and Scuylkill ; 
and yet there is not so much foreign trade as there 
was at the beginning of the century. 

Four millions of gallons of pure water are supplied 
every day for the use of the city ; so that we may 
say that both New York and Philadelphia are better 
furnished with this indispensable article than even 
London itself; where, in some parts of the town, the 
water is very scarce and hardly drinkable. The 
principal towns in the interior are Lancaster, Harris- 
burgh, Reading, Pittsburgh, Beaver, and Erie. 

4. Delaware. 
This is the smallest of the States, except Rhode 
Island; and only contains 2,100 square miles, and a 
population of 80,000. Wilmington is the chief town, 
with 10,000 inhabitants. 

SOUTHERN STATES. 

The inhabitants are represented as more generous, 
hospitable, and honourable than their northern coun- 
trymen ; frequently exhibiting a manly independence 
of thought and conduct, but not so frugal, industri- 
ous, moral, or religious as they might be ; whilst the 
curse of slavery, under which they labour, smothers all 
spirit of enterprise, and will finally ruin them, as it 
ruined ancient Rome ! 



208 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

1. Maryland. 

A flourishing State, containing 11,000 square miles, 
producing large quantities of flour and tobacco. The 
great inlet of the sea, called Chesapeake Bay, runs up 
into the interior, and divides the State into two por- 
tions, called east and west. 

The Catholic religion flourishes in Maryland ; but 
one-fourth of the entire population is collected in the 
city of Baltimore, which is the fourth city of the 
Union. 

2. District of Columbia. 

This is a separate District, not belonging to any 
of the States. It is only ten miles square, and con- 
tains the federal city of Washington. Congress 
meet in it the first Monday in December. It is a poor 
place ; there are shad and herrings caught in the 
bay. 

3. Virginia. 

This is the largest and most ancient of the States, 
containing 70,000 square miles ; being about the size 
of Great Britain, but a more uniformly good soil. 
Virginia has also great advantages as to her position, 
climate, and rivers. She is the oldest settled State 
in the Union, and the most aristocratic, going by the 
name of Old Dominion. She has fourteen good rivers ; 
and it has been thought that grapes and mulberries 
might be cultivated with success. Minerals abound ; 



UNITED STATES IX 1845. 209 

but, notwithstanding her numerous advantages, po- 
pulation remains stationary at about a million and a 
quarter, half blacks and half whites, or nearly so. 
Virginia has also furnished the nation with more 
public men than any other State, five out of the eleven 
Presidents having been Virginians, with a similar 
proportion of secretaries and ministers to foreign 
courts. 

Richmond, the capital, is hardly more than a village ; 
whilst Petersburgh and Lynchburgh, though all pretty 
places, are still more inconsiderable. Over the moun- 
tains "Wheeling is the most like a town ; but Harper's 
Ferry, and the White Sulphur Springs, are spots 
eminently beautiful, and deserving a special visit. In 
the western and south-western parts of the State, 
beyond the Ohio, there is abundance of good land to 
be purchased at a few shillings per acre: but an emi- 
grant's life, even in Ohio or Virginia, is nothing but 
a protracted struggle, and it would be far from a step 
to be recommended to go even to one of these best of 
the States, even if the settler got his land for 
nothing. Notwithstanding its slave character, the 
writer thinks highly of Western Virginia, but the 
100 degrees variation of the thermometer prevails 
there as well as elsewhere, and the mahogany com- 
plexions of the settlers' wives tell a tale of hard 
living, suffering, and toil, that would be ill relished by 
those of his countrymen in England who live at home 
at ease ! 



210 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 



4. Nortli Carolina. 



This is a large State, possessing 50,000 square 
miles. On the sea-coast the land is low, sandy, 
swampy, and insalubrious ; but in the interior rises 
into mountains, called the Blue Ridge, 6,500 feet 
high. This State abounds in turpentine trees, and 
carries on a considerable trade in lumber. Gold 
mines are worked, and more than pay their expenses ; 
a piece of pure gold having lately been found that 
sold for 8,000 dollars ! Like all parts of the States, 
the number of persons born blind, or deaf and dumb, 
is very large ; it generally averaging one and a half 
per cent, of the total population. 

5. South Carolina. 

This is a much richer district than the Northern 
State of the same name, though not so large ; South 
Carolina containing only 33,000 square miles. 
The climate is very bad; the air, hot, moist, and 
unelastic, occasions constant yellow fever. The cul- 
tivation of rice is carried on to a large extent where 
the plantations are under water; and cotton also 
grows with great luxuriance. In the low grounds of 
this State there are three blacks to one white, a fear- 
ful disproportion ; and which must, some day or other, 
have a disastrous result. Charleston is the principal 
town, which contains 30,000 inhabitants; but they 
are rather decreasing than otherwise. The total 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 211 

population of the State is 590,000, of which three- 
fifths are slaves. 

6. Georgia. 

A very large State, of 62,000 square miles ; but, 
like the Carolinas, the sea-coast is low and marshy, 
abounding in pine-barrens. The population is 
600,000 ; Savannah is the sea-port, and Augusta the 
principal town of the interior. The population of 
600,000 are more than half slaves, and are principally 
employed in the cultivation of cotton. Some gold is 
found in this State. 

7. Florida, 

This is an insignificant State, lately admitted into 
the Union. It contains 55,000 square miles ; but 
does not possess one inhabitant to the mile, though 
more than half are slaves. The country is dreadfully 
sickly for six months in the year. Key West, a low, 
sandy island on the coast, is the principal place. Poor 
as the State of Florida is, it ships nevertheless 60,000 
bales of cotton annually. St Augustine is the oldest 
town in the Union, and, ten years ago, it used to 
supply a few oranges to some of the northern ports ; 
but, though as hot as Havannah, the severe frosts of 
1837 cut the trees up root and branch, and destroyed 
the trade. The general Government have a naval 
station at the port of Pensacola, but it is a wretched 
place. 



212 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

8. Alabama 
Contains 52,000 square miles ; is situate in the Gulf 
of Mexico ; but, like the other States of the Atlantic 
coast, it is low and sandy. This character of the 
country extends for fifty or sixty miles from the sea. 
But the cheapness and goodness of the land has, 
notwithstanding its heat, moisture, and consequent 
insalubrity, attracted to Alabama a large immigration 
from other States ; and it now exports 460,000 bales 
of cotton per annum from the port of Mobile alone. 
This town, or city as it is called, contains upwards of 
20,000 inhabitants. It is a very flourishing place ; 
and the cotton-planters this year (1845) are satisfied to 
receive four and four cents and a half per pound for 
their crop, say twopence-farthing sterling at Mobile, 
which might be sold at threepence per pound at 
Liverpool. About the first week in September the 
people of Mobile begin to die off in great numbers, 
owing to the sickly season; but all who can afford it 
leave the city for the high grounds or the Eastern 
States, and remain there till winter commences. The 
villages of Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, and Florence, 
each having a population of 2,000 persons, are the 
principal places in Alabama. Population, 600,000, 
half slaves. 

9. Mississippi. 

This State contains 48,000 square miles. The great 
river forms its western boundary for 700 miles; it 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 213 

is low, wet, hot, and extremely unhealthy. The Yazoo 
district is very fertile ; and the whole State produces 
this year (1845) nearly half a million bales of cotton; 
with a population of only 400,000, who are more than 
half slaves. Natchez and Vicksburg are the princi- 
pal towns, containing about 4,000 and 5,000 persons 
respectively; whilst Jackson, Woodville, Granada, 
and Columbus, are the next in importance, but are 
only villages of 2,000 inhabitants. 

10. Louisiana. 

This is the last of the Southern States in our enu- 
meration, but the first in importance. It is the same 
size as its opposite neighbour ; and contains, like Mis- 
sissippi, 48,000 scpaare miles. But there is not a hill 
in the whole country, which is subject to frightful 
inundations ; which are carried off by lagoons and 
bayous along the river, and at or near the mouth. 
The population is only 400,000, and one-half are 
slaves, though there are 120,000 inhabitants in the 
single city of New Orleans. A million of bales of 
cotton will be shipped from this port, the produce of 
the crop of 1845. New Orleans is an extremely 
sickly place ; and about the middle of August the 
people begin to die like dogs, so that the lower part 
of the river is nearly deserted by all who can afford to 
go away ; whilst at Christmas, when the town has 
become not only healthy but agreeable, there are 
40,000 to 50,000 strangers in the city. An immense 



214 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

business is transacted during the winter at New 
Orleans ; which at that period assumes the character 
of almost Parisian gaiety, every night, Sunday in- 
cluded, offering plays, balls, or masquerades. Several 
most respectable newspapers are published in this 
city, French as well as English ; and branch houses 
from all the principal cities of Europe have estab- 
lishments at New Orleans. 

The Westekn States 
May be generally characterized as exclusively boast- 
ing of vast prairies or natural meadows without a 
tree to be seen, and in parts a great deficiency of 
water ; a territory rich in minerals, and enjoying the 
advantages of a navigation, by means of its numerous 
rivers, unrivalled in the world. 

1. Ohio. 

This is a beautiful country, embracing 44,000 
square miles, and a population of 2,000,000; and 
may be looked upon as one of the best and most im- 
portant States of the Union. In the eastern parts 
it has a fine rolling, undulating surface, healthy and 
picturesque; and in the southern parts, along the 
banks of the river, it has an inexhaustible fertility. 
Ohio is the Indian word for beauty ; and it was never 
better applied than to this noble stream. 

The principal town is Cincinnati, which is centrally 
situated, and, being in an abundant country, has made 



UNITED STATES IX 1845. 215 

greater progress in population than any town in the 
United States. The climate is also not so bad as it 
is in most other places, although there is often a 
change of sixty degrees in six hours ! Cincinnati 
contains 100,000 people, and is the sixth town in the 
Union, coming next after Baltimore and Boston. 
There are other numerous towns in the State, such 
as Columbus, Chillicothe, Zanesville, Marietta, Steu- 
benville and Cleveland, having 6,000 and 10,000 
inhabitants ; whilst others, such as Sandusky, Toledo, 
and Dayton, on the borders of Indiana, are each of 
about 5,000 people. This State of Ohio compares 
very favourably with any others ; and if I were in- 
clined to settle myself in any part of the Union, — 
which I am not, — or if I were inclined to recommend 
any State of the Union to others, — which I am not, 
— it would most likely be Ohio, or on the Ohio river. 
But Englishmen, as I have said elsewhere, must 
not dream of emigrating to any part of the States as 
farmers ; for this class of emigrants the road to the 
States is the road to ruin; and if they cannot do at 
home, let them go to Canada West ; where they will 
enjoy superior advantages every way, and at least 
avoid being cheated and insulted. 

2. Kentucky. 
This is a very fine State ; and it is a pity it should 
be cursed with slavery. The extent of Kentucky is 
40,000 square miles, and the population 800,000. 



216 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

The Mammoth Cave is one of the greatest curiosities 
in America. Wheat, Indian corn, hemp, tobacco, and 
salt, are the principal articles of farm produce ; but 
horses and cattle are bred to a great extent ; and 
more attention has been paid to grazing in Kentucky 
than in any other State of the Union. The rivers, 
flowing over a limestone soil, dry up in summer with 
the great heats. Louisville is the chief city, con- 
taining 40,000 people ; whilst Frankfort and Lexing- 
ton are considerable towns in a beautiful country. 
The celebrated Henry Clay resides in this State, at 
his farm of Ashland ; and though he was too honest 
a man to be elected for President, enjoys a reputation 
the very highest in America. 

3. Tennessee. 

This is a very fine State, covering 45,000 square 
miles ; and is divided into three sections, East, West, 
and Middle. East Tennessee is high and mountain- 
ous ; the Middle is hilly, and rather warmer climate ; 
whilst West Tennessee is hot, flat, damp, and rich; 
bounded by the river Mississippi, where the principal 
town is built on one of the bluffs of the great river, 
and called Memphis. The population of the State is 
800,000, one quarter of which are slaves. Nashville 
is the capital, and the only town deserving the name 
in the State, having 10,000 inhabitants; the rest of 
the towns, as they are called, being mere villages of 
600 and 700 inhabitants. Such are Knoxville, 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 217 

Blouutsville, Jonesbro', Rogersville, &c. The climate 
of East Tennessee is reckoned the best in America ; 
though even there the thermometer is often at zero 
during the winter, and as frequently in July and 
August at 100 and 105 deg. The country is, how- 
ever, reported as comparatively healthy, and free 
from fever, except by the sides of rivers, and is a very 
cheap and abundant country, being rather remote 
from markets ; eggs being threepence per dozen, 
chickens fourpence each, ducks sixpence, butter five- 
pence per pound, beef and pork three halfpence, 
hams threepence. There are some English keeping 
shops in this State, but it is a business requiring 
care and capital, as they are compelled to keep a stock 
of everything, from a silk dress to a tin pot ; and 
then they are obliged to take payment in feathers, 
whisky, bacon, bees'- wax, cloth, flour, &c. The 
legal interest of money in all these Southern and 
"Western States is eight per cent. ; and by agreement, 
eighteen per cent, even is allowed. 

4. Michigan 
Is a very extensive State, containing 60,000 square 
miles. St Mary's River, fifty miles long, which leads 
into Lake Superior, has unfortunately some consider- 
able falls, which prevents anything larger than boats 
from entering the Lake ; but the State Legislature 
has authorized a canal being constructed, which is 
actually commenced, and will be of great benefit to 

u 



218 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

the trade of this remote and desolate region, on account 
of the prodigious quantity of copper ore lately disco- 
vered on the southern shore of the lake ; and which 
bids fair to rival, if not surpass, all the mines of Great 
Britain put together ; the ore turning out on smelt- 
ing forty per cent, of metal. Michigan is a large 
peninsula, about the size of England and Wales, but 
without a hill. The climate is very cold in the 
northern parts, much colder than Canada West ; and 
yet, young as the State is, the population amounts to 
400,000. Detroit is the principal town, with about 
20,000 inhabitants ; the next important being Mun- 
roe, Fort Gratiot, Mackinaw, and St Joseph's. 
Fever and ague abound in the whole peninsula, and 
may be considered the curse of the country. 

5. Indiana. 
A low, flat, swampy, and unhealthy State, covering 
36,000 miles, but highly fertile and productive. 
There are neither mountains, minerals, nor manufac- 
tures. The Wabash Canal is a great work, extending 
from Lake Erie to the river Ohio, at Evansville, a 
distance of 440 miles through Maumee and Terre 
Haute. The population, notwithstanding the sickly 
climate, is constantly increasing, and next year it is 
expected to reach a million of persons. The settlers 
live in a rude abundance, board and lodging being 
obtainable in most places as low as four shillings per 
week ! The principal towns are New Albany, nearly 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 219 

opposite Louisville, on the Ohio ; Indianopolis, La 
Fayette, Lawrenceburgh, and Vincennes. Many of 
them are low and often inundated, whilst in the sum- 
mer water is very scarce and very bad through the 
greater part of the interior. 

6. Illinois. 

A large and important State, containing 55,000 
square miles. It has not been so long settled as 
Indiana, and therefore not so populous, the inhabit- 
ants being about 700,000; but in a few years it will 
overtake her, and is expected indeed to surpass her, 
as there are few countries in America that promise 
more rapid and more certain progress than Illinois, 
whilst there is nothing to obstruct it except its sickly 
climate, the thermometer often in the summer stand- 
ing at ten degrees hotter than the West Indies, whilst 
in the winter the settlers' log-huts are sometimes 
nearly buried underneath eight feet of snow ; and per- 
sons not taking care of themselves run a danger of being 
frozen to death. The Illinois Canal, to connect Chicago 
with Peru, and thus unite the Great Lakes with the 
Mississippi River, is an easy scheme, it being only 
100 miles distance, and must, from its importance 
give a great impetus to the trade and settlement of 
Illinois. 

The chief towns are Alton on the Mississippi, 
Peoria, Springfield, and Galena, which is the head- 



220 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

quarters of the lead-mining country, and a very flou- 
rishing place. 

7. Missouri. 

This is a State of great extent, comprising 64,000 
square miles, and is destined to become one of the 
most important in the Union. On the banks of the 
Mississippi and the Missouri the land is low and 
inundated, and not adapted for human habitations, 
except on a few high bluffs, offering some extent of 
building land ; but in the interior, away from the two 
great rivers, the country becomes elevated and better 
drained, but sometimes so perfectly barren as not to 
be worth a farthing an acre. The State of Missouri 
is rich in minerals, and its lead and iron are thought 
to be inexhaustible. In addition to these advantages 
the country to the south improves in temperature, 
and grazing will at all times amply reimburse the 
enterprising settler. A great quantity of rich furs 
are obtained from the Indians, and the population is 
fast increasing, and even now exceeds 600,000. The 
traffic occasioned by the wants of emigrants to Cali- 
fornia, Oregon, and Texas, is a source of considerable 
profit to the State. St Louis is the capital, and 
numbers already 40,000 people, and is expected to be 
the metropolis of the Western States, and perhaps, 
some day or other, the seat of the general Govern- 
ment, in lieu of Washington. Jefferson City is a 
failure, having been built in a swamp on the Missouri, 



UNITED STATES IX 1845. 221 

just as the towns of New Madrid and St Genevieve 
have been washed away by the floods of the Missis- 
sippi ; and even St Louis is by no means safe, for if 
it is not washed away, the river threatens to leave it, 
and make its channel on the other or Illinois side. 

8. Arkansas. 

This State is pronounced as if written Arkansaw. 
It is a wild, unimportant country, extending over 
55,000 square miles, sterile, barren, sickly, and thinly 
peopled, there not being more than 100,000 inhabit- 
ants. It is a slave State, and what little agriculture 
there is, is in cotton, but even that is trifling. There 
are no towns, and the chief village and seat of Govern- 
ment, called Little Rock, hardly numbers 1,000 persons. 

9. Wisconsin. 

This is a new State, admitted into the Union in 
1845. It is an immense, cold country, comprising 
100,000 square miles; and except for its lead mines, 
not good for much. Milwaukie, Racine, and Prairie 
du Chien, are the only towns, and the population is 
as yet very trifling, some of the counties of 300,000 
acres not containing twenty inhabitants! For the 
four summer months the climate may be reckoned 
good ; but for the other eight months, owing to the 
number of wet prairies, the cold is intense. A canal 
is intended to connect the Fox River in Green Bay 
with the Wisconsin River, by which steamers will be 



222 UNITED STATES IN 1845. 

enabled to go direct from Buffalo to New Orleans 
without shifting, an uninterrupted fresh- water navi- 
gation of nearly 5,000 miles ! Wisconsin abounds in 
lead, and is expected to yield an abundance of copper. 
Milwaukie is a flourishing place, and the price of 
town lots has increased there most rapidly. 

10. Iowa. 

This is the last of the "Western States, and in 
many respects is one of the best. It is estimated to 
contain 150,000 square miles; but the settled parts 
do not extend over more than 40,000 in the south of 
the State, and along the banks of the Des Moines 
River. The country abounds in lead, and promises 
to be a rich agricultural and grazing country besides. 
It enjoys also, for America, what may be considered 
a fine climate, and smart emigrants from the Eastern 
States of the Union cannot fail to do well here, 
though I would caution my countrymen in England 
from having anything to do with Iowa, though it is a 
favourite quarter at the present ; and about Fort 
Madison, Davonport, Burlington, Dubuque and Iowa 
City, there will be money to be made for many years 
to come. The Mandan nation of Indians used to be 
numerous a few years ago in this country, but the 
small-pox was introduced, and out of 1,600 individuals, 
all died but thirty-one. The Missouri River exhibits 
a stupendous sight at what is called the Gates of the 
Rocky Mountains. The stream is only 450 yards 



UNITED STATES IN 1845. 223 

wide, and perpendicular rocks come down close to the 
water 1,200 feet high, continuing for many miles. 
In the North-western part of the State of Iowa a 
canal, it is said, of one mile from St Peter's River to 
Lake Winnipeg, would connect Hudson's Bay with 
the Mississippi River ! 

Texas. 

Though not yet formally admitted into the Ameri- 
can Union, no doubt it will be at this present session, 
commencing in December, 1845, when it is expected 
to be organized into three distinct States, the present 
dimensions being 200,000 square miles. Whether 
Santa Fe is to be included is not known, although it 
is quite clear that it never formed any part of the 
province of Texas. 

This vast country consists of immense prairies, 
where a good deal of cotton is cultivated, and large 
herds of cattle reared. The year is divided into dry 
and wet seasons ; and though the country is so near 
the tropics, the cold is very severe in December and 
January. The principal towns are St Augustine, 
Nacodotches, Austin, Matagorda, Houston, and Gal- 
veston, which are more or less subject to destructive 
inundations. The population of the country exceeds 
300,000. If it should be divided into three States, it 
will add six senators to Congress, and thus give a 
preponderating influence to the institution of slavery, 
and all southern interests of the United States. 



224 



APPENDIX. 
By an American. 

geographical and general view of oregon. 
Its Islands. 

Oregon is a vast country lying on the Pacific Ocean, 
stretching along the coast through twelve degrees 
and forty minutes of latitude, extending its eastern 
limits into the body of the Rocky Mountains, and 
embracing within those boundaries an area of four 
hundred thousand square miles. Attached to this 
immense territory, and extending along the whole 
line of its coast from the Strait of Fuca to its northern 
limit, and even beyond that to the Arctic Sea, is a 
continuous chain of islands, known by the general 
name of the North-west Archipelago, which in 
themselves can scarcely be regarded as less than a 
feature of secondary importance. The largest are 
all traversed by mountain ridges, in the direction of 
their greatest length, and the whole archipelago may 
be considered as a portion of the westermost chain of 
mountains, broken off from the main land at the 
Strait of Fuca, and running through the sea, con- 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 225 

necting those of Oregon on the south with the range 
on the north, of which Mounts Fairweather and 
St Elias are the most prominent peaks. 

The first and chief of these islands is Quadra and 
Vancouver's. This extends along the coast from 
48 deg. 30 min., in a northerly direction, for the 
space of one hundred and sixty miles, and forms, by 
its parallel course with the coast (from which it is 
distant about twenty miles), the celebrated arm of 
the sea called the Strait of Fuca. Its average width 
is about forty-five miles, and it contains a surface of 
about fifteen thousand square miles. The climate of 
this island is mild and salubrious, and large portions 
of its soil are arable and capable of advantageous 
cultivation. It has an abundance of fine harbours, 
which afford accommodations for vessels of any size. 
The chief of these is ISTootka Sound, the Port Lorenzo 
of the Spaniards, a spacious and secure bay, running 
deep into the land, under parallels 49 deg. 34 min., 
and containing within itself many other harbours, 
affording most excellent anchorage. 

A few miles south of Nootka, we come to another 
large bay, called Clyoquot, in which we have seen 
that Captain Kendrick preferred to remain during 
the winter of 1789, to any other harbour on the 
coast. There is another still further south, named 
Nittinat, which lies at the entrance of the Strait of 
Fuca, and is filled with an archipelago of little islands. 
The coasts of this island, and, indeed, the coasts of 



226 HISTOEY OF OREGON. 

those above, abound with fine fish of various descrip- 
tions, among which the salmon predominates. In 
consequence of their fisheries, the islands are more 
numerously populated by the natives than the ter- 
ritory of the main land. 

The next island of significance is Washington, or 
Queen Charlotte's. It received the former title from 
Captain Gray, who circumnavigated it for the first 
time in the summer of 1789. It is triangular in its 
form, is one hundred and fifty miles in length, and 
contains four thousand square miles. After Gray's 
visit it became the favourite resort of the American 
traders of the North Pacific. Its climate and soil are 
represented by Captain Ingraham as being extremely 
well adapted for agricultural purposes, particularly 
those portions in the vicinity of a fine harbour in 
latitude 53 deg. 3 min. on its eastern coast, and at 
Port Estrada, or Hancock's River, on the north side. 

The islands of the next importance below the 
southern cape of Prince of Wales' Island, (which is 
the point of our northern boundary line) are Pitt's, 
Burke's, Dundas', and the Princess Royal groups. 
Most of those lie between Washington Island and 
the shore, and form a numerous archipelago, which 
renders the intervening navigation extremely tor- 
tuous and difficult. Between Washington and Van- 
couver's Island is a continuous line of others, of 
considerable size, lying closer to the land, and fol- 
lowing with their eastern outlines almost every 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 227 

sinuosity of the continental shore. These latter 
groups are for the most part uninhabited, and are 
composed of granite and pudding stone, which appear 
to be the prevailing rock north of latitude forty -nine. 
They are generally destitute of fresh water, and 
having but few anchorages, the strong intervening 
currents render navigation perplexed and dangerous. 
They are only resorted to by the natives in the 
spring and in the fall on account of their fisheries. 

The Coast and its Harbours. 
The coast of Oregon from the forty-second parallel 
to the mouth of the Columbia, pursues a northwardly 
course, and from that point trends with a slight and 
gradual westerly inclination to the Strait of Fuca. Its 
profile consists of a bold, high, wall-like shore of rock, 
only occasionally broken into gaps or depressions, 
where the rivers of the territory find their way into 
the sea. The first of these openings above the 
southern boundary line is the mouth of the Klamet. 
This is a stream of considerable size, issuing from 
the land in 42 deg. 40 min., and extending into it 
to a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. It has 
two large tributaries, called by the unromantic titles 
of Shasty and Nasty rivers, an error of taste, which 
it is to be hoped the future " Alleghanians," who 
inhabit their fertile valleys, will correct and reform. 
The bay of the Klamet is admissible only for vessels 
of very light draught ; its whole valley is extremely 



228 HISTOEY OP OEEGON. 

fertile, and the country adjacent to the stream 
abounds with a myrtaceous tree, which, at the 
slightest agitation of the air, diffuses a fragrance that 
lends to it another feature of an earthly paradise. 
Between this and the Urnpqua River, disemboguing 
in 33 deg. 30 min., are two other small streams, 
neither of which, however, affords a harbour available 
for commercial purposes. 

The Umpqua river is a considerable stream, enter- 
ing the land to the distance of a hundred miles. It 
has a tolerable harbour, navigable, however, only for 
vessels drawing eight feet of water, and its stream, 
thirty miles from the sea, is broken by rapids and 
falls. Its valley is blessed with its portion of the 
general fertility of the lower region of Oregon, and 
consists of alternate groves of stupendous timber and 
rich arable plains. The Hudson's Bay Company have 
a fort at the mouth of the river, the site of which is 
the scene of a flourishing settlement. Five lesser 
streams find their way into the sea, at intervals, from 
this point to the mouth of the Columbia, and contri- 
bute their aid in fertilizing the extensive region lying 
between the coast and the parallel barrier running at 
the distance of a hundred or a hundred and fifty 
miles, known as the President's range of mountains. 

The mouth of the Columbia is found at 46 deg. 
16 min., but is only distinguishable from the sea by 
a slight and gradual inner curve in the shore. Like 
all the harbours formed by the rivers on the sea-coast, 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 229 

it is obstructed with extensive sand-bars, formed by 
the deposits of the river on its meeting with the 
ocean, and, according to Lieutenant Wilkes, "its 
entrance, which has from four and a half to eight 
fathoms of water, is impracticable for two-thirds of 
the year, and the difficulty of leaving it is equally 
great." It is thought by some that these obstacles 
may be removed in time by artificial means, but it is 
an extremely doubtful question whether it can ever 
be made an available harbour for vessels of any 
draught. 

Passing Cape Disappointment, the northern headland 
of the river's mouth, we sail forty miles further north, 
where we find a secure anchorage in Gray's Bay, for 
vessels drawing ten feet of water ; but this harbour 
is considered of little importance on account of the 
extensive sand-flats which usurp the greatest portion 
of its entire surface. From Gray's Bay to Cape 
Flattery, the southern point of the Strait of Fuca, 
but two streams, and those of but trifling significance, 
break the overhanging barrier of the coast. 

We have now traversed the whole coast of Oregon 
lying immediately on the Pacific, and in its course of 
five hundred miles, find but two places of refuge for 
vessels (Gray's Bay and the mouth of the Colum- 
bia), and even these are of but trifling importance in 
a commercial point of view. Indeed, all geographical 
authorities agree that none of the harbours on this 
portion of the coast can be deemed safe ports to enter. 

x 



230 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

The next branch of the coast demanding our atten- 
tion is that which lies along the Strait of Fuca. 
This immense arm of the sea cuts off the northward 
line of the coast at Cape Flattery, in latitude 48 deg. 
23 min., and runs apparently into the land in a south- 
easterly direction for about a hundred and twenty 
miles. It then turns north-west by west, and follow- 
ing that direction for three hundred miles more, joins 
the sea again at Pintard's Sound. The southern 
portion of this strait varies from fifteen to thirty 
miles in width, and the coast of Oregon along its 
course is an exception, in its maritime advantages, to 
the portion immediately on the sea. It abounds with 
fine inland sounds, offering a secure anchorage to 
vessels of the heaviest draught, and there are no por- 
tions of the interior navigation which conceals a 
hidden danger. The straits can be entered in any 
wind, and the great rise and fall of the tides offer 
facilities for building maritime establishments unsur- 
passed in any portion of the world. Here, whatever 
direction emigration may for the present take, the 
commercial operations of the territory will eventually 
centre, and the din of our naval arsenals will proclaim 
to the world the fulfilment of the prediction that 

" The course of empire has westward found its way." 

The most important branch of this strait is a spa- 
cious arm descending from its eastern extremity in 
a southerly direction, into the land to the distance of 



IIISTOHY OF OREGON. 231 

one hundred miles. It is called Admiralty Inlet, and 
the lowermost portion of it is known as Puget's Sound. 
This inlet, like the other southern portions of the 
strait, is filled with splendid harbours, the southern- 
most of which has the peculiar advantage of being 
within but little more than three hundred miles of 
the navigable waters of the Missouri. Great quanti- 
ties of bituminous coal have been found in its vicinity, 
and there are other peculiar advantages attached to 
the station, Avhich must eventually make it a point of 
the first importance. These circumstances have not 
escaped the watchful eyes of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany, and they have already established a fort and a 
settlement there, by way of securing possession of the 
point.* At the south-east end of Vancouver's Island 
there is a small archipelago of islands, which, though 
well wooded, are generally destitute of fresh water. 
They are consequently, for the most part, uninhabited. 
The coast of the main land along the north-western 
course of the strait is cut up and penetrated by 
numerous inlets, called, from their perpendicular sides 
and deep water, canals. They afford no good har- 
bours, and offer but few inducements to frequent 
them. One large river empties into the strait about 



* The consideration of the maritime advantages of the southern 
coast of the Strait of Fuca and Puget's Sound, suggests a pretty 
forcible view of the remarkable liberality of Great Britain's offer of 
the Columbia as the line of compromise. This, while it secures to 
her every navigable harbour, does not leave us one. 



232 HISTOEY OF OREGON. 

latitude 49 deg., which pursues a northerly direction 
for several hundred miles. It is called the Tacoutche, 
or Fraser's River, and has a trading-post named Fort 
Langley situated near its mouth. The other portion 
of the coast to the north is much of the same charac- 
ter as that south of this river, on the strait. It is 
cut up by inlets, and the numerous islands which line 
it, and the heavy fogs that are frequent in the 
region, render it at all times difficult to approach or 
to navigate. 



THE NATURAL DIVISIONS OF OREGON. 
The Three Regions. 

Oregon is divided into three distinct regions, by 
three separate mountain ranges, with an additional 
inferior chain, binding the extreme outline of the 
Pacific coast. 

Overlooking the rim upon the ocean edge, the first 
chain we come to is the Cascade Mountains, or, as 
they are sometimes called, the President's Range. 
They start below the 42nd parallel, and run on a line 
with the coast at a distance varying from 100 to 150 
miles throughout the whole length of the territory ; 
rising in many places to a height from 12,000 to 
15,000 feet above the level of the sea in separate 
cones. Their succession is so continuous as to almost 
interrupt the communication between the sections, 
except where the two great rivers, the Columbia and 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 233 

Eraser's, force a passage through ; an achievement 
which they only accomplish by being torn into foam, 
plunged down precipices, or compressed into deep 
and dismal gorges. This chain of mountains has 
obtained the title of the President's Range, in conse- 
quence of their most elevated peaks having been 
named after the chief magistrates of the United 
States, by a patriotic American traveller. 

The stupendous line runs from Mount Jackson to 
Mount Tyler, and there is yet room among their 
gigantic cousins for several succeeding dignitaries. 
The idea which suggested their adaptation to our 
natural history was a happy one. Perpetual memen- 
toes in the archives of our nation, they form no 
perishable notes of heraldry for the contempt of a 
succeeding age, but basing their stupendous data 
upon the eternal earth, pierce with their awful gran- 
deur the region of the clouds, to transcribe then- 
records on the face of heaven. The first of them, 
Mount Jackson, commences the list, in 41 deg. 10 
min. ; Jefferson stands in 41 cleg. 30 min. : John 
Quincy Adams in 42 deg. 10 min.; Madison in 43 
deg. ; Monroe in 43 deg. 10 min. ; Adams in 45 deg. ; 
Washington (the Mount St Helens of the English) 
in 46 deg. ; Van Buren, north-west of Puget's Sound, 
in 48 deg. ; Harrison, east of the same, in 47^ deg., 
and Tyler in 49 deg. Of these, Mount. Jackson is 
the largest, and is said to rise above the level of the 
sea near 20,000 feet. Washington, which is next in 



234 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

size, is estimated at 17,000 to 18,000. This is the 
most beautiful of all. It ascends in a perfect cone, 
and two-thirds of its height is covered with perpetual 
snow.* 

The region of country lying between this range of 
mountains and the sea is known as the first or 

LOWER REGION OF OREGON. 

The Blue Mountains form the next division. They 
commence nearly in the centre of Oregon, on parallel 
of longitude 43 deg. west from Washington, and in 
46 deg. of lat. They run southwesterly from this 
point for 200 miles in an irregular manner, occasion- 
ally interrupted, and shooting off in spurs to the south 
and west. 

The region between this ridge and the President's 
Range is called the second or middle region. 

Beyond the Blue Mountains, and lying between 
them and the Rocky Mountains, is the high coun- 
try, OR THIRD REGION OF OREGON. 

The general course of the Rocky Mountains is 
from south to south-east. They run south from 
54 deg. 46 min., parallel to the coast (at a distance of 
500 miles), for 300 miles, and gradually extend their 
distance from the sea by a continuous south-easterly 
course to over 700 at the 40th degree. In these 
mountains, and their offsets, rise the principal rivers 



* The limit of perpetual snow for these mountains is, according 
to Lieutenant Wilkes, 6,500 feet from the level of the sea. 



HISTORY OP OREGON. 235 

which find their way into the Pacific to the west, and 
the Gulf of Mexico on the east. Near the 42nd 
parallel is a remarkable depression in the chain, called 
" the Southern Pass " which experience has proved 
affords a short and easy route for carriages from our 
States into the territory of Oregon. Above the 48th 
parallel, again, other passes are formed by the course 
of the rivers, from either side, which find their way 
in some places between the mountains. There are 
other ridges intersecting the face of this vast country, 
but they are principally offsets or spurs of the three 
main chains already described. The principal of 
these is the Wind River cluster, on the east of the 
Rocky Mountains, from which flow many of the 
head-waters of the Missouri and the Yellow Stone 
Rivers. 

Climate and Characteristics of the Three Regions. 

The third region or high country is a 
rocky, barren, broken country, traversed in all direc- 
tions by stupendous mountain spurs, on the peaks of 
which snow lies nearly all the year. It is from 2,000 
to 3,000 feet above the level of the sea, and in conse- 
cpaence the rivers flowing through it westward to 
the Columbia are broken at frequent intervals by 
the rugged descent, and rendered unnavigable almost 
throughout the whole of their course. There are but 
few arable spots in this whole section of territory, its 
level plains, except narrow strips in the immediate 



26b HISTORY OF OREGON. 

vicinity of the rivers, being covered with sand or 
gravel, and being also generally volcanic in their 
character. The distinguishing features of the terri- 
tory are its extreme dryness, and the difference of its 
temperature between the day and the night. It sel- 
dom rains except during a few days in the spring, 
and no moisture is deposited in dews. In addition to 
these discouraging features, the climate, from its 
enclosure between these snowy barriers, is extremely 
variable, a difference of fifty and sixty degrees taking 
place between sunrise and mid-day. The soil is 
moreover much impregnated with salts, springs of 
which abound in many places. It will be seen by 
reference to the journal which forms the latter por- 
tion of this work, that some of these possess highly 
medicinal qualities, and from the beauty of their 
situation will doubtless become, before time is done, 
the resort of the fashionable population of Western 
America. 

Notwithstanding all these unfavourable qualities, 
there are many small prairies within its mountains, 
which, from their production of a nutritious bunch 
grass, are well adapted for grazing purposes, and 
in despite of its changeable climate, stock is found to 
thrive well, and to endure the severity of the winter 
without protection. 

The second or middle region of Oregon, 
between the Blue and the President Ranges, is less 
elevated than the third, and consequently all the stern 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 237 

extremities of the latter's climate and soil are pro- 
portionately modified. Its mean height is about a 
thousand feet above the level of the sea, and much of 
its surface is a rolling prairie country, with the ex- 
ception of the portion above latitude 48 deg., -which 
is very much broken by rivers and traverse mountain 
chains. It is consequently adapted only in sections 
to farming purposes. Plenty of game, however, is 
found in the forests of the country to compensate 
for its unfitness for agriculture. Below this parallel, 
and in the middle of the section, are extensive plains, 
admirably adapted to stock raising, from the per- 
petual verdure always overspreading them, and from 
the salubrious climate that prevails throughout their 
neighbourhood. Cattle thrive even better here than 
in the low country, and there is no necessity for 
housing them at any time ; neither need provender 
be laid in, the natural hay found always in abund- 
ance on the prairies being preferred by them to the 
fresh grass upon the bottoms. It is in this region 
the Indians raise their immense herds of horses, and 
here, whenever the territory shall be numerously 
settled, may be bred clouds of horsemen, who would 
not be exceeded by any light cavalry in the world. 

The southern portion of this region, as it advances 
to the boundary line, becomes less favourable to the 
purposes of man, and loses its fertility by rolling into 
swelling sand-hills, producing nothing but the wild 
wormwood, mixed with prickly pear, and a sparse 
sprinkling of short bunch grass. 



238 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

The first or lower region of Oregon is that 
which lies along the coast, and extends westward to 
the line of the President's range of mountains. The 
portion of this lying north of the Columbia and be- 
tween it and the Straits of Fuca, is a heavily tim- 
bered country covered with forests of trees of extra- 
ordinary size. It has, however, its spaces of prairie 
on which good pasturage is found, and it has also 
some fine arable land. This section is watered by 
four rivers, of which the Chickelis, disemboguing 
into the Columbia, and the Cowelitz, emptying into 
the sea at Gray's Harbour, are the most important. 
The forests of this portion of the lower region are its 
great feature. They consist of pines, firs, spruce, 
red and white oak, ash, arbutus, arbor vita?, cedar, 
poplar, maple, willow, cherry, and yew, with so close 
and matted an undergrowth of hazel, and other 
brambles, as to render them almost impenetrable to 
the foot of man. Most of the trees are of an enor- 
mous bulk, and they are studded so thick that they 
rise before the beholder like a stupendous and im- 
pregnable solidity, which declares futile all ordinary 
attempts to penetrate it. This astonishing exuber- 
ance is not confined alone to the timber of the section 
north of the Columbia, for we have an account of a 
fir growing at Astoria, eight miles from the ocean, 
on the southern bank of the Columbia, which mea- 
sured forty-six feet in circumference at ten feet from 
the ground, ascended one hundred and fifty-three 
feet before giving ofi° a branch, and was three hun- 



HISTORY OF OHEGOX. 239 

dred feet in its whole height. Another tree of the 
same species is said to be standing on the Umpqua, 
the trunk of which is fifty-seven feet in circumfer- 
ence, and two hundred and sixteen feet in length 
below its branches. Prime sound pines, from two 
hundred to two hundred and eighty feet in height, 
and from twenty to forty in circumference, are 
by no means uncommon. The value of this spon- 
taneous wealth has already been appreciated by 
the acute company who reign commercially pre- 
dominant in this region, for already their untiring 
saw mills, plied by gangs of Sandwich Islanders and 
servile Iroquois, cut daily at Fort Vancouver alone 
thousands of feet of plank, which are transported 
regularly to the markets of the Pacific Islands. 

But to return to that section of the lower region 
lying between the Columbia and the Straits of Fuca. 
The banks of the Cowelitz are generally bare of 
timber, but the soil in their immediate vicinity is for 
the most part poor. The Hudson's Bay Company, 
however, have a fine farm of six hundred acres in its 
western valley, which in 1841 produced seven thou- 
sand bushels of wheat. The average produce is 
twenty bushels to the acre. They have also a saw 
and grist mill now in operation there, both of which 
find a market for their products in the Sandwich and 
other islands of Polynesia. Live stock do not suc- 
ceed avcII on these farms, and this is owing to the 
absence of low prairie grounds near the river, and 



240 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

also to the extensive depredations of the wolves. 
The hilly portion of the country immediately around, 
though its soil is very good, is too heavily timbered 
to be available for agricultural purposes, and this is 
also the case with many portions of the level land. 
There are, however, large tracts of fine prairie at 
intervals between, suitable for cultivation and ready 
for the plough. 

Proceeding northward, we came to Fort Nasqually, 
a fine harbour at the southern point of Puget's Sound. 
Here the Hudson's Bay Company have another fine 
settlement, and raise wheat (fifteen bushels to the 
acre), oats, peas, potatoes, and make butter for the 
Russian settlements. On the islands of the sound, 
and on the upper sections of Admiralty Inlet, the 
Indians cultivate potatoes in great abundance. These 
vegetables are extremely fine, and constitute a large 
portion of their food. 

Having disposed of this section, we come now to 
that portion of the lower region lying south of the 
Columbia, between the President's Range and the 
coast. This, by universal agreement, is admitted to 
be the finest portion of all Oregon. It is entered by 
the Willamette River, about five miles below Van- 
couver, which stream extends into its bosom over 
two hundred miles. This river is navigable for 
steam-boats and vessels of light draught for nearly 
forty miles, when you come to a fall — the invariable 
feature of the rivers of this territory. Above the 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 241 

falls are the principal settlements of Oregon. Here 
the American adventurers have principally established 
themselves, and by the contributions of the emigra- 
tions from the States their number is rapidly increas- 
ing. As these settlements are described with some 
particularity in the journal which concludes this 
work, we will omit a particular account of them in 
this place. 

The fertile portion of the valley of the Willamette 
is about two hundred and fifty miles long, and aver- 
ages about seventy in width, making in all a surface 
of more than seventeen thousand square miles of rich 
arable land. The soil is an unctuous, heavy, black 
loam, which yields to the producer a ready and pro- 
fuse return for the slightest outlay of his labour. 
The climate is mild throughout the year, but the 
summer is warm and very dry. From April to Oc- 
tober, while the sea breezes prevail, rain seldom falls 
in any part of Oregon. During the other months, 
and while the south winds blow, the rains are fre- 
quent, and at times abundant. 

In the vallies of the low country snow is seldom 
seen, and the ground is so rarely frozen that plough- 
ing may generally be carried on the whole winter. 
In 1834 the Columbia was frozen over for thirteen 
days, but this was principally attributable to the 
accumulation of ice from above. " This country," 
says Wyeth, " is well calculated for wheat, barley, 
oats, rye, peas, apples, potatoes, and all the vegetables 



242 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

cultivated in the northern part of the Union. Indian 
corn does not succeed well, and is an unprofitable 
crop." 

A letter * recently received from Oregon, and 
giving an account of last year's crop, will serve to 
show the wonderful productiveness of this delightful 
region, f 

Of this valley Lieutenant Wilkes says, " the wheat 
yields thirty-five or forty bushels for one bushel 

* " The harvest is just at hand, and such crops of wheat, barley, 
oats, peas, and potatoes, are seldom, if ever, to be seen in the States, 
that of wheat in particular — the stalks being in many instances as 
high as my head, the grains generally much larger — I would not 
much exaggerate to say they are as large again as those grown 
east of the mountains. The soil is good, and the climate most su- 
perior, being mild the year round, and very healthy, more so than 
any country I have lived in the same length of time. Produce 
bears an excellent price — pork, ten cents ; beef, six cents ; potatoes, 
fifty cents ; wheat, one dollar per bushel. These articles are pur- 
chased at the above prices with great avidity by the merchants for 
shipment generally to the Sandwich Islands and Russian settle- 
ments on this continent, and are paid for mostly in stores and 
groceries, the latter of which is the product of these islands, par- 
ticularly sugar and coffee, of which abundant supplies are furnished. 
Wages for labourers are high— common hands are getting from one 
to two dollars per day, and mechanics from two to four dollars per 
day. It is with difficulty men can be procured at these prices, so 
easily can they do better on their farms. The plains are a per- 
petual meadow, furnishing two complete new crops in a year, spring 
and fall, the latter remaining green through the winter. Beef is 
killed from the grass at any season of the year. If you have any 
enterprise left, or if your neighbours have any, here is the place 
for them." 

f The above is an extract of a letter from General McCarver, 
who is at present the Speaker of the Lower House of Oregon. 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 243 

sown ; or from twenty to thirty to the acre. Its 
quality is superior to that grown in the United 
States, and its weight is nearly four pounds to the 
bushel heavier. The above is the yield of the new 
land; but it is believed it will greatly exceed this 
after the third crop, when the land has been broken 
up and well tilled. In comparison to our own 
country, I would say that the labour necessary to 
acquire wealth or subsistence is in proportion of one 
to three ; or, in other words, a man must work 
through the year three times as much in the United 
States to gain the same competency. The care of 
stock, which occupies so much time with us, requires 
no attention here, and on the increase alone a man 
might find support." 

South of the valley of the "Willamette we come to 
that of the Umpqua, in which are found large prairies 
of unsurpassable arable land, though the vicinage of 
the river is chiefly remarkable for its gigantic pine 
timber. Some idea of the extraordinary size of its 
forest trees may be obtained from the fact that their 
seed cones are sometimes more than a foot in length. 
Below the Umpqua we next arrive at the country 
watered by the Tootootutna, or Rouges River, and 
beyond that, to the voluptuous valley of the Klamet. 
These lower portions of the first region are thought 
by many to be the paradise of the whole territory, 
excelling in richness of soil and voluptuousness of 
climate even the celebrated valley of the Willamette. 



244 HISTOEY OF OREGON. 

Of this opinion is Lieutenant Wilkes, to whose ex- 
ertions and researches we are indebted for most of 
our accurate geographical knowledge of the western 
portion of Oregon. Indeed, probability seems to be 
in favour of regarding the vallies of the Klamet, 
Tootootutna, and the Umpqua, as the gardens of the 
west, and the cause of the preference of the northern 
portions is to be attributed mostly to the readier 
access afforded to them by the avenue of the Colum- 
bia. Population, however, is already gradually en- 
croaching further and further south, and but few 
years will elapse before coasters will be running 
down to the mouths of these three rivers for their 
agricultural products. 

The principal settlement of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany is situated at Vancouver, on the Columbia ; a 
point ninety miles from its mouth. At this station 
the main branch of foreign commerce is carried on, 
and from it the chief exports in the Avay of pine 
plank, the grains, butter, &c, is made to the Russian 
settlements, and to the islands of the ocean. They 
have another farm upon the Fallatry plains, west of 
the Willamette and about ten miles from Vancouver, 
which is also well stocked, and in productive cul- 
tivation. 

Before concluding our description of this portion 
of Oregon, it may be well to state that the continual 
influx of emigrants from the States at the station of 
the Willamette, and the occasional connections of in- 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 245 

terest, rendered it necessary, in the absence of pro- 
tection from the laws of the Republic, that the Ame- 
rican settlers should establish a territorial government 
for themselves. They have accordingly proceeded to 
constitute two legislative bodies, to appoint a Chief 
Justice, and make the necessary ministerial officers 
to enforce his decisions. 

The two houses meet at stated periods in the year 
for the transaction of all the necessary business of 
the little body politic, and the degree of importance 
which the new legislature has already obtained may 
be estimated by the fact that the officers of the Hud- 
son's Bay Company have accorded their acknowledg- 
ment of its powers, by applying through the chief 
governor of all the stations in the territory (Doctor 
McLaughlin) for a charter for a canal around the 
Willamette Falls. The exclusive right was granted 
to him for twenty years, on the condition that he 
should, in two years, construct a canal around them 
sufficient for the passage of boats thirteen feet in 
width. 

This recognition of the authority of the legislative 
confederacy would, however, be a politic course in 
the resident governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, 
even though he should be ever so averse to it ; for 
such recognition would not affect the interests of his 
association in case it were overthrown by his own 
government, and it would afford him, meanwhile, an 
opportunity for the cpaiet pursuit of his plans. It is 



246 HISTOET OF OREGON. 

but just, however, to bear in mind, that the juris- 
diction exercised by the company over all the citizens 
in the territory, previous to this legislative conven- 
tion, was not their own arrogation, but the investi- 
ture of the British Government, for its own special 
objects ; and it is no less just to say that this power 
was exercised by the gentleman above named, during 
his rule, with a temperance and fairness but seldom 
found in those who have no immediate superior to 
account to. 

The letter that brings us this latter information 
also tells us the Doctor has already commenced his 
work with a large number of hands, and that there 
is no doubt of his perfect ability to complete it within 
the time named. He was likewise constructing at 
the date of this information (last August) a large 
flouring mill with four run of burs, which was to be 
ready for business last fall. 

The Rivers. 

Having completed a description of the general 
characteristics of the three regions of Oregon, there 
remains but one feature of its geography unfinished ; 
and as that extends for the most part continuously 
from region to region, it could not be properly em- 
braced in the particular account of any one. We 
allude to the course and characteristics of the Colum- 
bia River and its tributaries. 

The northern branch of the Columbia River rises 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 247 

in latitude 50 cleg, north, and 116 min. west (from 
Greenwich) thence it pursues a northern route to 
McGillivray's Pass in the Rocky Mountains. There 
it meets the Canoe River, and by that tributary as- 
cends north-westerly for eighty miles more. At the 
boat encampment at the pass, another stream also 
joins it through the mountains, and here the Colum- 
bia is 3,600 feet above the level of the sea. It now 
turns south, having some obstructions to its safe 
navigation in the way of rapids, receiving many tri- 
butaries in its course to Colville, among which the 
Beaver, Salmon, Flatbow, and Clarke's Rivers from 
the east, and the Colville and two smaller tributaries 
higher up from the west, are the chief. 

This great river is bounded thus far on its course 
by a range of high, well-wooded mountains, and in 
places expands into a line of lakes before it reaches 
Colville, where it is 2,049 feet above the level of the 
sea, having a fall of 550 feet in 220 miles. 

Fort Colville stands in a plain of 2,000 or 3,000 
acres. There the Hudson's Bay Company have a 
considerable settlement and a farm under cultivation, 
producing from 3,000 to 4,000 bushels of different 
grains, with which many of their other forts are sup- 
plied. On Clarke's River the company have another 
post called Flathead House, situated in a rich and 
beautiful country spreading westward to the bases of 
the Rocky Mountains. On the Flatbow also the 
company have a post, named Fort Kootanie. 



248 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

From Fort Colville the Columbia trends westward 
for about sixty miles, and then receives the Spokan 
from the south. This river rises in the lake of the 
Pointed Heart, which lies in the bosom of extensive 
plains of the same name. It pursues a north-westerly 
course for about two hundred miles, and then empties 
into the Columbia. Its valley, according to Mr 
Spaulding, an American Missionary who surveyed it, 
may be extensively used as a grazing district ; but 
its agricultural capabilities are limited. The chief 
features of its region are (like those of the upper 
country, through which we have already traced the 
Columbia and its tributaries) extensive forests of 
timber and wide sandy plains intersected by bold and 
high mountains. 

From the Spokan the Columbia continues its 
westerly course for sixty miles, receiving several 
smaller streams, until it comes to the Okanagan, a 
river finding its source in a line of lakes to the north, 
and affording boat and canoe navigation to a consi- 
derable extent up its course. On the east side of this 
river, and near its junction with the Columbia, the 
Company have another station called Fort Okanagan. 
Though the country bordering on the Okanagan is 
generally worthless, this settlement is situated among 
a number of small, but rich arable plains. 

After passing the Okanagan, the Columbia takes a 
southward turn, and runs in that direction for one 
hundred and sixty miles to Wallawalla, receiving in 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 249 

its course the Piscous, the Ekama, and Entyatecoom 
from the west, and lastly, the Saptin or Lewis River 
from the south. From this point the part of the 
Columbia which we have traced, though obstructed 
by rapids, is navigable for canoes to the Boat En- 
campment, a distance of five hundred miles to the 
north. The Saptin takes its rise in the Rocky 
Mountains, passes through the Blue, and reaches the 
Columbia after having pursued a north-westerly di- 
rection for five hundred and twenty miles. It brings 
a large volume of water to the latter stream, but in 
consecpience of its extensive and numerous rapids, it 
is not navigable even for canoes, except in reaches. 
This circumstance is to be deplored, as its course is 
the line of route for the emigration of the States. It 
receives a large number of tributaries, of which the 
Kooskooske and Salmon are the chief. Our previous 
account of the arid and volcanic character of this 
region obviates the necessity of a farther description 
here. There is a trading station upon the Saptin 
near the southern boundary line, called Fort Hall, 
and one also near its junction with the Columbia, 
called Fort Wallawalla. The Columbia at Walla- 
walla is twelve hundred and eighty-four feet above 
the level of the sea, and about three thousand five 
hundred feet wide. It now takes it last turn to 
the westward, pursuing a rapid course of eighty 
miles to the Cascades, and receiving the Umatilla, 
QuisnelPs, John Day's, and Chute Rivers from 



250 HISTORY OP OREGON. 

the south, and Cathlata's from the north. At the 
Cascades the navigation of the river is inter- 
rupted by a series of falls and rapids, caused by 
the immense volume forcing its way through the 
gorge of the President's Range. From the Cascades 
there is still-water navigation for forty miles, when 
the river is again obstructed by rapids ; after passing 
these, it is navigable for one hundred and twenty 
miles to the ocean. The only other great independent 
river in the territory is the Tacoutche or Frazer's 
River. It takes its rise in the Rocky Mountains 
near the source of Canoe River; thence it takes a 
north-westerly course for eighty miles, when it makes 
a turn southward, receiving Stuart's River, which 
brings down its"waters from a chain of lakes extending 
to the 56th degree of latitude. Turning down from 
Stuart's River, the Tacoutche pursues a southerly 
course until it reaches latitude 49 deg., where it 
breaks through the Cascade range in a succession of 
falls and rapids, then turns to the west, and after a 
course of seventy miles more, disembogues into the 
Gulf of Georgia, on the Straits of Fuca, in latitude 
47 deg. 7 min. Its whole length is three hundred and 
fifty miles, but it is only navigable for seventy miles 
from its mouth by vessels drawing twelve feet of 
water. It has three trading posts upon it belonging 
to the company : Fort Langley at its mouth, Fort 
Alexandria at the junction of a small stream a few 
miles south of Quisnell's River, and another at the 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 251 

junction of Stuart's River. The country drained by 
this river is poor and generally unfit for cultivation. 
The climate is extreme in its variations of heat and 
cold, and in the fall months dense fogs prevail, which 
bar every object from the eye beyond the distance 
of a hundred yards. The chief features of the section 
are extensive forests, transverse ranges of low coun- 
tries, and vast tracts of marshes and lakes, formed 
by the streams descending from the surrounding 
heights. 

The character of the great rivers is peculiar — 
rapid and sunken much below the level of the country, 
with perpendicular banks, they run as it were in 
trenches, which make it extremely difficult to get at 
the water in many places, owing to their steep ba- 
saltic walls. They are at many points contracted by 
dalles, or narrows, which during the rise, back the 
Avater some distance, submerging islands and tracts 
of low prairie, and giving them the appearance of 
extensive lakes. 

The soil along the river bottoms is generally 
alluvial, and would yield good crops, were it not for 
the overflowing of the rivers which check and kill 
the grain. Some of the finest portions of the land 
are thus unfitted for cultivation. They are generally 
covered with water before the banks are overflown, 
in consequence of the quicksands that exist in them, 
and through which the water percolates. 

The rise of the streams flowinc; from the Cascade 



252 HISTOKY OF OEEGON. 

Mountains takes place twice a year, in February and 
November, and are produced by heavy and abundant 
rains. The rise of the Columbia takes place in May 
and June, and is attributable to the melting of the 
snows. Sometimes the swell of the latter is very 
sudden, if heavy rains should also happen at that 
period ; but it is generally gradual, and reaches its 
greatest height from the 6th to the 15th of June. 
Its perpendicular rise is from eighteen to twenty feet 
at Vancouver, where a line of embankment has been 
thrown up to protect the lower prairie ; but it has 
generally been flooded during these visitations, and 
the crops often destroyed. 

The greatest rise of the Willamette takes place 
in February, and sometimes ascending to the height 
of twenty feet, does considerable damage. Both this 
river and the Cowelitz are much swollen by the 
backing of their waters during the height of the 
Columbia, all their lower grounds being at such times 
submerged. This puts an effectual bar to the bor- 
der prairies being used for anything but pasturage. 
This happily is fine throughout the year, except in 
the season of floods, when the cattle must be driven 
to the high grounds. 

The lakes of Oregon are numerous and well dis- 
tributed in the different regions of the territory. In 
the northern section the Okanagan (from which 
flows the river of that name), Stuart's, and Frazer's, 
near the upper boundary ; Quisnell's in 53 cleg., and 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 253 

Klamloop's in 51 deg., are the largest. In the cen- 
tral section we have the Flatbow, the Cour d'Alene, 
or " Pointed Heart," and the Kullespelm ; and in the 
southern district are the Klamet, the Pit, and an 
abundance of inferior lakes, as yet unnoticed on the 
maps, and for which geographers have not yet been 
able to discover names. Several of the latter are 
salt, and, at intervals, we find chains of hot springs 
bubbling in some plaees above the ground, like those 
of Iceland. The smaller lakes are said to add much 
to the picturesque beauty of the streams. 

The whole territory is well watered in all direc- 
tions, and from the peculiar character of its rivers, 
their descent, the rapidity of their currents, and their 
frecpient falls, there is perhaps no country in the 
world which affords so many facilities for manufac- 
turing purposes through the agency of water power. 
This is a peculiarly happy circumstance, when taken 
into consideration with the fact that the timber 
overspreading the western portion, and clustering 
around its mill sites, will for a long time form one 
of the principal exports in the markets of the Pacific. 
This will appear from the high prices which it now 
commands, and also from the fact that no other 
portion of the north-west eoast produces it. Already 
trading vessels resort to the mouth of the Columbia 
to supply themselves with spars, and other necessary 
materials, and the improving facilities of inland in- 



254 HISTORY OF OREGON". 

terconimunication has directed some of it from point 
to point within the territory. 

Having now completed our account of the great 
physical characteristics of Oregon, our attention na- 
turally turns to those portions of its natural history 
which are equally necessary to render a land service- 
able to the wants of man. Of these, the first and 
most important are the fisheries. "These," says 
Lieutenant Wilkes, " are so immense, that the whole 
native population subsist on them." All the rivers, 
bays, harbours, and shores, of the coast and islands, 
abound in salmon, sturgeon, cod, carp, sole, flounders, 
ray, perch, herring, lamprey eels, and a kind of smelt 
or sardine, which is extremely abundant. The dif- 
ferent kinds predominate alternately, according to 
the situations of the respective fisheries, but the 
salmon abound everywhere over all. This superior 
fish is found in the largest quantities in the Columbia, 
and the finest of them are taken at the Dalles. They 
run twice a-year, May and October, and appear in- 
exhaustible. To so great an extent is traffic in them 
aleady advanced, that the establishment at Vancouver 
alone exports ten thousand barrels of them annually. 
There are also large quantities of oysters, clams, crabs, 
mussels, and other kinds of shell-fish, found in the 
different bays and creeks of the country; and, to 
complete this piscatory feature, we are further told 
that whales are also found in numbers along the coast 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 255 

and at the mouth of the Strait of Fuca, where they 
are frequently captured by the piscivorous aborigines. 

Of game an equal abundance exists. In the 
spring and fall the rivers literally swarm with geese, 
duck, cranes, swans, and other species of water-fowl ; 
and the elk, deer, antelope, bear, wolf, fox, marten, 
beaver, muskrat, grizzly bear, and siffleur, make, with 
them, the harvest of the hunter's rifle. In the middle 
section little or no game is to be found, but in the 
third region, the buffalo are plenty, and form an at- 
traction to numerous hunting parties of the Blackfeet 
and Oregon Indians. 

The population of Oregon territory has been esti- 
mated by Lieutenant Wilkes to be about 20,000, of 
whom 19,200 or 300 are aborigines, and the remain- 
ing 700 or 800, whites. This number and its pro- 
portions have, however, increased and varied con- 
siderably since the time of his estimate. The years 
succeeding his visit beheld large emigrations from 
the States, and the white population of Oregon may 
now be safely set down as being between 2,000 and 
3,000, of whom the majority are from the States. 
The largest portion of these are located in the valley 
of the Willamette, where, as we have already seen, 
they have adopted a government of their own. The 
other white inhabitants are sprinkled about in different 
portions of the territory, at the establishments of the 
Hudson's Bay Company, whose officers and servants 
amount, in all, to between 500 and 600, but this 



25Q 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 



number does not include their Iroquois and Sandwich 
Island serfs. 

There are no means of ascertaining with accuracy 
the numbers of the aboriginal population, as many of 
them move from place to place in the fishing seasons ; 
but, for the purpose of furnishing the reader with the 
nearest warrant for reliance, we will here insert a 
tabular statement, prepared by Mr Crawford, of the 
Indian department, for the use of last Congress. 

Indians West of the Rocky Mountains, in the Oregon 
District, and their Numbers. 



Nes Perces 


- 


Chimnapuns 


- 2,000 


Ponderas 


- 


Shallatlos 


- 200 


Flat-heads - 


- 800 


Speannaros - 


- 240 


Cour D'Alene 


- 


Saddals 


- 400 


Shoshonies - 


- 1,800 


Wallawallahs 


- 2,600 


Callapooahs 


- 


Chopunnishees 


- 3,000 


Umbaquahs 


- 


Catlashoots - 


- 430 


Kiyuse 


- 


Pohahs 


- 2,000 


Spokeus 


- 


Willewahs - 


- 1,000 


Oknanagans 


- 


Sinacsops 


- 200 


Cootomies - 


- 


Chillokittequaws 


- 2,400 


Chilts 


- 800 


Echebools - 


- 1,000 


Chinookes - 


- 400 


Wahupums - 


- 1,000 


Snakes 


- 1,000 


Euesteurs - 


- 1,200 


Cathlamahs - 


- 200 


Clackamurs - 


- 1,800 


Wahkiakumes 


- 200 


Chanwappans 


- 400 


Skillutes 


- 2,500 







Sokulks 


- 3,000 




29,570 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 257 

The most numerous and warlike of the Oregon 
Indians are in the islands to the north, but on the 
main land they are generally friendly and well-dis- 
posed. They are, however, rapidly passing away 
before the advancing destiny of a superior race, and 
with the wild game, vanish gradually from the white 
man's tracks. Those remaining are a servile and 
degraded class, who perform the meanest offices of 
the settlements, and readily consent to a mode of 
existence under the missionaries and other settlers, 
but little short of vassalage. In the Willamette 
valley there are now left but a few remnants of the 
once numerous and powerful tribes that formerly 
inhabited it. At the mouth of the Columbia there 
are some few of the Chenooks still left, and about 
the Cascades and at the Dalles still linger considera- 
ble numbers of this ill-fated and fast-fading people. 
There is no longer any spirit left in them; their 
hearts are broken, their bows unstrung, and from 
lords of the soil they have sunk to the degradation of 
its slaves. 

The Kiuses and Nes Perces still maintain a por- 
tion of their independence, but numbers of them, 
through the exertions of the missionaries, have made 
considerable advances in civilization, and many more 
would doubtless adapt themselves to a more methodi- 
cal system of life, were not the first lessons of the 
science an exaction of their labours for the benefit of 
others. At the present they can only be regarded 



258 HISTORY OF OREGON. 

in the light of a servile population, which, in the 
existing dearth of labour, is rendered of vast service 
to the active settler. In speaking of the influences of 
the missionaries over the Indians, Lieutenant Wilkes 
remarks : " They have done but little towards Chris- 
tianizing the natives, being principally engaged in 
cultivating the mission farms, and in the increase of 
their own flocks and herds. As far as my personal 
observation went, there are very few Indians to 
engage their attention, and they seemed more occu- 
pied with the settlement of the country and agricul- 
tural pursuits than in missionary labours." 

The treatment of the Indians by the Hudson's Bay 
Company is politic and judicious ; they rigidly en- 
force that wise provision of their charter which for- 
bids the sale of ardent spirits, and in carrying it out 
have even been known, upon the arrival of a vessel at 
the Columbia with spirits aboard, to purchase that 
portion of the cargo, to prevent others from defeating 
the wisdom of the prohibition. Schools for the native 
children are attached to all the principal trading posts, 
and particular care is extended to the education of 
the half-breed children,* the joint offspring of the 
traders and the Indian women, who are retained and 
bred, as far as possible, among the whites, and subse- 
quently employed, when found capable, in the service 
of the company. The policy of this course is obvious. 

* A natural obligation where so many are born. 



HISTORY OF OREGON. 259 

The savage is gradually cured of his distrust, and 
coaxed into new connexions. He abandons the use 
of his bows, his arrows, and all his former arms, and 
the result is that he soon becomes an absolute de- 
pendent upon those who furnish him his guns, ammu- 
nition, fish-hooks, blankets, &c. 



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